If the Germans conquered England, and other essays

j LIBRARY^)

UNIVERSITY OF
CALIFORNIA

SAN D/EGn

IF THE GERMANS CONQUERED
ENGLAND, AND OTHER ESSAYS

Printed by George Robert*, Dublin

IFTHE GERMANS

CONQUERED ENGLAND
AND OTHER ESSAYS
BY ROBERT LYND

MAUNSEL AND COMPANY LTD.
DUBLIN AND LONDON. 1917

TO

ALICE STOPFORD GREEN

THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS IRISHWOMAN OF HER TIME

A LAMP OF LEARNING TO HER PEOPLE

OF KINDNESS TO HER FRIENDS

Vll

PREFATORY NOTE

Some people will remember that, at the outbreak
of the insurrection in Dublin in Easter Week, 1916,
the insurgents issued a little paper called Irish War
News. The first page opened with an article entitled :
"If the Germans Conquered England," which was
based upon, and was more or less a quotation and
endorsement of, the first essay in the present book.
Thus the essay, if it has no other interest, is, at least*
of interest in the use to which it was put on an
historic occasion.

By a curious chance, on its appearance in The
New Statesman, certain English Tories, as well as
Irish Nationalists, discovered in it a reasonable
statement of the principles of patriotism. One
Tory professor read it out approvingly to a class of
young officers, in order to bring home to them the
things England is fighting for in the present war.
This is not quite so astonishing as at first appears.
The Irish national cause is the cause of every nation
England included which is fighting against
tyranny. Ireland does not demand any kind of
liberty which she does not wish to see England,
France, Belgium, Poland, and all the other nations
enjoying in equal measure. She desires to be
neither a slave-owner nor a slave among the nations.
Ireland, in her struggle against English Imperialism,
is the close counterpart of England and (closer still)

ix

PREFATORY NOTE

Belgium in their struggle against German Imperial-
ism. Germany, if she conquered England, could do
no wrong that has not been done or is not even now
being done by England in Ireland. The chief
horror of conquest does not consist in atrocities: it
consists in being conquered.

The Allies, in fighting against Germany, seem to
me to be fighting against the principle and practice
of conquest. There are, no doubt, forces of evil
fighting on the side of the Allies as well as on the
side of Germany. The Morning Post is red in
tooth and claw in 1917 as it was in 1913, and the
Spectator is still in its Irish attitude as expert as
ever in making the worse appear the better cause
in a way that appeals to clergymen. But even the
Morning Post and the Spectator, whether they like it
or not, are fighting for the same kind of liberty for
which Irishmen are fighting. They cannot be hos-
tile to the invaders of Serbia and the invaders of
Belgium without acquiescing in principles of liberty
which are applicable to every community of civilized
men. When the Central Powers began the war
with an attack on two small nations, they declared
war on Nationalism all the world over. When the
Allies took up the cause of those two small nations
whether from interested or disinterested motives
makes no difference they began what I believe
will prove to be a war against Imperialism all the
world over. The United States of the World in
which all the empires will disappear, and all the
nations, great and small, will live on terms of liberty,
equality, and fraternity, is now, at least, within the
scope of the prophet, if not of the practical politician.

PREFATORY NOTE

The peace of the world, indeed, is possible only as a
result of some such reconciliation of the nationalist
and internationalist ideals of the human race.

Practically all the essays in this book have
appeared in the New Statesman, which must not,
however, be regarded as necessarily acquiescing in
the opinions I have expressed. The sketch of
T. M. Kettle appeared in the Daily News, and that
of Sheehy-Skeffington in the Ploughshare. The
essay, "On Nationalism and Nationality'' was
written as a preface to a report of the Nationalities
and Subject Races Conference as long ago as 1910.

ROBERT LYND
June 1917

XI

CONTENTS

Page

IF THE GERMANS CONQUERED ENGLAND I

THE DARKNESS 9

REVENGE 15

THE ASS 22

FAREWELL TO TREATING 28

REFUGEES 3

COWARD CONSCIENCE 40

ON DOING NOTHING 47

RUTHLESSNESS 53

MYTHS 60

COURAGE 68

THRICE IS HE ARMED ... 74

THIS LUXURIOUS EARTH 80

ON SAVING MONEY 86

PEACE ON EARTH Q2

GRUB 98

ON TAKING A WALK IN LONDON 104

WHITE CITIZENS IIO

ON BEING A WORKING MAN Il8

THE BUSINESS MAN 124

HORRORS OF WAR 130

T. M. KETTLE 137

FRANCIS SHEEHY-SKEFFINGTON 14!

NATIONALITY 147

THE SPIRIT OF MAN 153

xiii

IF THE GERMANS CONQUERED
ENGLAND

When a small tradesman applies for exemption
from military service on the ground that his business
would be ruined by his absence, a question that is
often put to him is: "What do you think will happen
to your business if the Germans win the war ? " As
a rule the tradesman does not know what to think.
He has no means of measuring world-catastrophes.
He has not Dr. Johnson's short way with questions
to whichvthere is no answer. In the first place, the
small tradesman does not believe in the possibility
of a German victory. In the second place, he has
not the slightest idea 'what would happen to his
business as the result of one. Perhaps, however, he
knows as much about the matter as the members of
the tribunals. All of us know that a German victory
which involved the conquest of England would make
life intolerable for Englishmen until the conquest
was undone. But as to its effect on small businesses,
that is another matter. It is quite possible that the
little grocery, the little tobacco-shop, and the con-
fectioner's would be able to hold up their heads
under German rule as under English. The valid
argument against a German conquest is not that it
would make an end of the small business man ; it
is that it would make an end of a free England.
If it could be proved that a German conquest
would add twenty-five per cent, to the incomes of
all Englishmen, even that would not make it toler-
able. Most men in all nations are ready to sacrifice
their lives in order that their country may be free.

IF THE GERMANS

They are also though this is apparently much more
difficult ready to sacrifice their fortunes.

Consider for a moment the possibility that England
might actually grow richer under German rule. It
is very unlikely, because England is already a highly-
developed country, but consider the one chance in a
hundred million. We know that, so far as material
wealth is concerned, Prussian Poland has gone
forward, not backward, under Prussia. Mr. W. H.
Dawson, author of The Evolution of Modern Germany,
is a witness whose evidence on this point cannot be
lightly dismissed. Referring to the work of the
Settlement Board in Prussian Poland, he writes :
" If the purpose had simply been the economic re-
awakening of the Polish East there would be much
to praise and to admire in the results that have been
achieved, for the settled districts have been entirely
transformed and raised to a level of prosperity never
known before." There are men with a passion for
efficiency to whom such a record of material
progress appeals as a justification of any kind of
tyranny. We had an example of this spirit some
time ago in the boasts of some German newspapers
that under German rule the industries of Belgium
were already reviving, and that Belgian prosperity
would soon be on a sounder basis than ever. One
may be sure that in the conquered territories, even
in these days of martial law and high prices,
thousands of little businesses in Belgium are as-
tonishingly alive. Lawyers still practise in the
law-courts, doctors attend the sick, priests go on
preaching, shops are open, factories are working,
fields are cultivated. This, of course, is not uni-
versally true ; and, while the country remains a
battlefield, it can only be true of certain parts of it.
But it is clear enough that, whatever other evils
would follow the permanent conquest of Belgium, the
refusal to allow the average Belgian to make a living

CONQUERED ENGLAND

would not necessarily be one of them. It is not for
the right to make a living, it is for the right to live
their own national life, that the Belgians are fighting.
Like Wordsworth's Englishmen, they " must be free
or die." That is not mere uneconomic rhetoric.
Freedom is a form of wealth which brave nations
prize above gold and silver. Professor Kettle
horrified some of the followers of Sir Edward
Carson during the Home Rule controversy when
he declared that he put freedom before finance. In
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, I admit, freedom
and sound finance, so far from being antitheses, are
complementary to each other. But, even though
they were not, Professor Kettle's attitude would
be the right one. The man who would prefer
finance to freedom ought also, in order to be con-
sistent, to prefer finance to honour and justice, and
all those other noble abstractions, belief in which
differentiates good Europeans from wild animals.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Germany
triumphed so overwhelmingly an extremely un-
likely supposition, I agree that she was able to
incorporate England in the German Empire, and
suppose that she was resolved to purchase the
acquiescence of Englishmen in German rule by
developing English industries and English arts
as they had never been developed before, would the
spirit of England yield to the bribe ? One can
imagine how Germany, with the hope of this in her
mind, would set out with all her efficiency to
reorganize the railways and the canals, and so give
an unwonted elasticity to the industrial life of the
country. One can imagine how she would set
about the work of town-phmning and street-sweep-
ing. One can imagine how she would build
technical schools, art schools, and musical academies
and opera houses. One can imagine how she
would build the long-lost Shakespeare Memorial

IF THE GERMANS

Theatre. But even though the English farmer
found himself with a freer access to markets and
the English manufacturer found himself with a
kingdom of chemists and inventors at his disposal,
the country would still have something to complain
about. In the first place, it would be constantly
irritated by the lofty moral utterances of German
statesmen who would assert quite sincerely, no
doubt that England was free, freer indeed than
she had ever been before. Prussian freedom, they
would explain, was the only real freedom, and
therefore, England was free. They would point to
the flourishing railways and farms and colleges.
They would possibly point to the contingent of
M.P.'s which was permitted, in spite of its deplor-
able disorderliness, to sit in a permanent minority
in the Reichstag. And not only would the English-
man have to listen to a constant flow of speeches
of this sort ; he would find a respectable official
Press secretly bought by the Government to say
the same kind of things over and over every day
of the week. He would find, too, that his children
were coming home from school with new ideas of
history. They would be better drilled, more obe-
dient than he himself used to be in his schooldays,
but he would get angry when he heard what was
taught to them as history. They would ask him
if it was really true that until the Germans came
England had been an unruly country constantly
engaged in civil war, as in the days of the Wars of
the Roses, Cromwell, William III., the Young
Pretender, and Sir Edward Carson a country
one of whose historians actually glorified a king
who had beheaded his wives, and one of whose
kings was afterwards beheaded ; a country which
sold its own subjects into slavery; a country which
was given its Empire by Frederick the Great, and
which then deserted him ; a country which gave

CONQUERED ENGLAND

birth to Shakespeare, but could not appreciate him ;
a country which had won its way in the world by
good luck and treachery, not by honesty and in-
telligence. One can guess how the blackening
process would go on. It would be done for the
most part by reasonable-looking insinuation. The
object of every schoolbook would be to make the
English child grow up with the feeling that the
history of his country was a thing to forget, and
that the one bright spot in it was that it had been
conquered by cultured Germany.

And in every University the same kind of thing
would be going on. Behind round spectacles
generation after generation of Prussian professors
would lecture on the history of the German Empire
(including, as one of its less important aspects, the
history of England). They would teach young
Englishmen that Luther, and Frederick, and Stein,
and Goethe, and List, and Bismarck were the
founders of civilisation. They would possibly add
the suggestion of Houston Chamberlain that Christ
and St. Paul and Dante were part of the German
tradition. They would begin to spell Shakespeare
with an " Sch." They would probably explain
that Shakespeare in German was superior to
Shakespeare in English. Like Houston Chamber-
lain, they would believe in " the holy German
language" as they believe in God. They would
say it was a better language than English because
it was inflected. They would set on foot a move-
ment to substitute it for English in the schools
and colleges, in order to prevent English children
from growing up insular and cut off from the
world-civilisation. Gradually it would become an
offence to use English as the language of in-
struction. In another generation it would become
an offence to use it at all. If there was a revolt
and, by the dog, as Socrates used to say, there

5

IF THE GERMANS

would be ! German statesmen would deliver grave
speeches about " disloyalty," " ingratitude," " reck-
less agitators who would ruin their country's
prosperity." Prussian officials would walk up and
down every town and every village in the country,
the embodiment of this grave concern for the
welfare of England. Prussian soldiers would be
encamped in every barracks the English conscripts
having been sent out of the country either to be
trained in Germany or to fight the Chinese in
order to come to the aid of German rectitude,
should English sedition come to blows with it.

Thus, if England could only be got to submit, would
she be gradually warped. She would be exhorted
to abandon her own genius in order to imitate the
genius of her conquerors, to forget her own history
for a larger history, to give up her own language
for a " universal " language in other words, to
destroy her household gods one by one, and to put
in their place alien gods. Such an England would
be an England without a soul, without even a
mind. She would be a nation of slaves, even though
every slave in the country had a chicken in his
pot and a golden dish to serve it on. No amount
of prosperity could make up for the degradation
of living perpetually under the heel of the Prussian
policeman and under the eye of the Prussian
professor. Even the man who kept a small
sweet-shop would feel queer stirrings of rage
within him, however prosperous he was, how-
ever clean the streets were swept, as he saw his
policeman-conqueror tramping majestically past
his door. He would feel as if he were in the
grip of some monstrous machine. He would
tell himself that law and order was a good thing
but not at this price. To live among all those
pompous foreign officials would be worse than
being in prison. There would be a fire in his head

6

CONQUERED ENGLAND

till he met another man with a fire in his head, and
together they would form a secret society and look
forward to the great day of rebellion.

It is against this spiritual conquest of England
rather than against the threat of bankrupt busi-
nesses that Englishmen will fight with the fiercest
inspiration. The real case against Germany is
not so much that a German conquest would
make England bankrupt, as that it would make
England no longer England. Englishmen would
shrink from German rule at its best no less than
from German rule at its most atrocious. They
would spurn Germany as a conqueror bringing
gifts equally with Germany as a conqueror bringing
poverty and destruction. Wordsworth, in a similar
mood, has expressed the feelings of a " high-minded
Spaniard " when in 1810 Napoleon held out to
Spain the hope of peace and prosperity under his
sway:

" We can endure that he should waste our lands,
Despoil our temples, and by sword and flame
Return us to the dust from which we came ;
Such food a tyrant's appetite demands :
And we can brook the thought that by his hands
Spain may be overpowered, and he possess
For his delight a solemn wilderness
Where all the brave lie dead. But when of bands
Which he will break for us he dares to speak,
Of benefits and of a future day,
When our enlightened minds shall bless bis sway ;
Then, the strained heart of fortitude proves weak ;
Our groans, our blushes, our pale cheeks declare,
That he has power to inflict what we lack strength
to bear."

That is not one of Wordsworth's greatest sonnets,
but it expresses well enough the passion which

7

IF THE GERMANS CONQUERED ENGLAND

Belgium must feel at the present moment, when
the Germans are trying to get them to look forward
to an era of benefactions under German rule. It
expresses, too, the passion which Englishmen would
feel in the same circumstances. No man with
the slightest glimmer of patriotism would consent
to see his country made a nation of millionaires at
the price of being a nation of slaves.

THE DARKNESS

It was common enough during the first year of the
war to meet people who took an aesthetic pleasure
in the darkness of the streets at night. It gave them
un nouveau frisson. They said that never had London
been so beautiful. It was hardly a gracious thing
to say about London. And it was not entirely true.
The hill of Piccadilly has always been beautiful, with
its lamps suspended above it like strange fruits.
The Thames between Westminster Bridge and
Blackfriars has always been beautiful at night, pour-
ing its brown waters along in a dusk of light and
shadow. And have we not always had Hyde Park
like a little dark forest full of lamps, with the gold of
the lamps shaken into long Chinese alphabets in the
windy waters of the Serpentine ? There was Chel-
sea, too. Surely, even before the war, Chelsea by
night lay in darkness like a town forgotten and
derelict in the snug gloom of an earlier century.
And, if Chelsea was pitchy, St. George's-in-the-East
and London of the docks were pitchier. There we
seemed already to be living underground. The very
lamps, yellow as a hag's skin with snuff in every
wrinkle, seemed scarcely to give enough light to
enable one to see the world of rags and blackness
which one was visiting like a stranger from another
planet. One finds it so difficult to conjure up the
appearance of London in the time before the war
that one may be exaggerating. But, so far as
one can remember, night in London was even
then something of an enchantress and London
the land of an enchantress. Her palace-lights, her
dungeon darkness, her snoring suburbs tucked away

THE DARKNESS

into bed after a surfeit of the piano and the gramo-
phone here, even in days of peace, was an infinite
variety of spectacle. Not that I will pretend that
the suburbs were ever beautiful. They are more
depressing than a heap of old tins, than a field of
bricks, than slob-lands, than vineyards in early
summer. They are more commonplace than the
misuse of the word " phenomenal " or the jargon of
house-agents. They do not possess enough character
even to be called ugly. They are the expression in
brick of the sin of the Laodiceans. Neither the light
of peace nor the Tartarus of war can awaken them
out of their bad prose. One thinks of them as the
commodious slave-quarters of modern civilization.
The human race has yet to learn, or to re-learn, how
to build suburbs. It is a proof of our immorality
that we cannot do so. Well, the darkness has at
least hidden the face of the suburbs. It has changed
long rows of houses into little cottages, and monot-
onous avenues into country lanes down which
cautious figures make their way with torches.
Sometimes in these circumstances, the dullest street
becomes like a parade of will-o'-the-wisps. The
post-girl alone, with her larger lamp, is impressive
as a motorcar or a policeman. She steps with the
self-assurance of an institution past the images of
lost souls looking for Paradise by candlelight. . . .
Certainly, the first searchlight that waved above
London like a sword was wonderful. That made
the darkness and Charing Cross beautiful. The
lovers of darkness were right when they praised
searchlights. Probably the first of them was but a
tiny affair compared to those that now lie thick as
post-offices between the hills of north and south
London ; but it impressed the imagination as an
adventurer among the stars. One would not have
been unduly surprised if one had caught sight of
the prince of the powers of the air making his way

10

THE DARKNESS

on black wings from star to star at the end of its
long beam. Later on, London sent forth a hundred
such lights. She spent her evenings like a mathe-
matician drawing weird geometrical figures on the
darkness. She became the greatest of the Futurists,
all cubes and angles. Sometimes she seemed like
a crab lying on its back and waving a multitude of
inevitable pincers. Sometimes she seemed to be
fishing in the sky with an immense drag-net of
light. Sometimes, on misty-moisty nights, the
searchlights lit up the sluggish clouds with
smudges of gold. It was like a decoration of water-
lilies on long stems of light. On nights on which
a Zeppelin raid was in progress one has seen the
the distant sky filled, as it were, with lilies, east
and west, north and south. And, for many people,
the Zeppelins themselves seemed to have beautified
the night. For my part, I confess I cannot regard
the Zeppelin without prejudice as a spectacle. That
it is beautiful as a silver fish, as the lights play on
it, I will not deny. Nor can one remain unmoved
by the sight as shells burst about it with little
sputters, like fireworks on a wet night. But, even
as a pyrotechnic display, the Zeppelin raid has, in
my opinion, been overestimated. They could do
better at the Crystal Palace. As soon as the first
novelty of the Zeppelins had worn off, it was their
beastliness rather than their beauty that impressed
itself upon those with the most persistent passion
for sight-seeing. Even the sight of a Zeppelin in
flames, awe-inspiring though it was, soon ceased to
be a novelty calling for superlatives. All the same,
London of the searchlights and the Zeppelins will
not be forgotten in sixty years. Men and women
now living will relate to their grandchildren how they
saw a ship in the sky in a tangle of gold lights, and
how the ship was then swallowed up in darkness,
and how, after a space of darkness and echoes, the

ii

THE DARKNESS

sky suddenly purpled into a false dawn and opened
into a rose of light. Then, hung in the air for a
moment, was a little ball of flame, and then the
darkness again, and only a broken rope of gold
hurriedly dropped down the sky to announce the
ultimate horror of disaster. Those who had a
nearer view of the affair will have their own variant
of the story. They, too, will tell how the sky
was suddenly flooded with monstrous tides of light
at midnight, and how the wonders of morning and
sunset were mingled, and how the sunset began to
move towards them with its red eye, with its red
mouth, a vast furnace-ship, an enemy of the world,
increasing, lengthening, a doom impending, till once
more darkness and foolish cheers, and laughter and
anecdotes in the streets. Assuredly, the darkness
of London has had its interesting moments. . . .
One has to admit the attractions even of the
common darkness of the streets. Perhaps it has
become, from an aesthetic point of view, excessive in
recent months, and, except on moonlight nights, we
have too much the air of shadowy creatures of the
Brocken as we make our way about in the dimness.
The tram that used to sail along like a ship with all
its lights burning was certainly a prettier thing to
see than the dismal 'bus of these days, packed like
a doss-house, charging into obscurity. A long line
of taxicabs can still give a street in a busy hour the
appearance of a stream of stars, and on a wet even-
ing even a procession of vans with their red lights
reflected in the pavement can impart to the com-
monest road the magic of a Venetian canal. But
the darkness is by no means so beautiful now as it
was when a few windows were still left lighted. At
the time of the first lighting regulations, we were
given a subdued light instead of a glare. Build-
ings with every feature a misunderstanding revealed
themselves as impressive masses ; illuminated adver-

12

THE DARKNESS

tisements disappeared; and we could still see to
read the evening papec in a 'bus, so that we were
rather gratified, or at least disinclined to grumble.
Now, however, we have reached the stage of real
darkness. To go out in it is, as I heard a servant
remark, like going into the coal-hole without a candle.
There are parts of the town in which even the soberest
man may walk into a tree or a lamp-post, and there
is almost no part of the town in which during the
dark of the moon a man may not fall down a flight
of stone steps and will not, if he does not carry an
electric torch. Perhaps the best compensation
Londoners have been given for the darkness is the
pleasing variety of the means by which the lights
have been dimmed in different neighbourhoods. In
some suburbs the lamps look as though they had
been dirtied like a slut's face. Elsewhere they wear
masks pierced with holes, and are terrible and black
like inquisitors or mediaeval executioners. Some of
them are blue, some green, some brown, some
flamingo-coloured. London, that lawless city, was
never more admirably lawless than in this. Light
falls from many of them like the veils that little
children wear in Catholic countries on taking their
first communion. From others it falls like the
garment of a ghost. Other lights give the effect of
a row of Chinese lanterns hung high above a high
street. But there is no sense of merriment amid all
these fantastic odds and ends of lights. The light
regulations have manifestly muted the life of London.
Even the Australian and Canadian soldiers who
pace so determinedly up and down the Strand and
hang in groups round every corner, have an elfin
unsubstantial appearance among the shadows. Men
not in khaki look black as Hamlets. Girls of the
plainest are mysteries till one hears their voices.
The porches of theatres are filled with a blue mystic
light that would make one speak in whispers. Night

13

THE DARKNESS

certainly falls on London like a blanket. Perhaps
it is mostly illusion. There is, as they say, all the
fun of the fair going on for those who are young and
giddy of heart, and London is not without laughter
and loud voices and reeling figures. But the effect
is, undoubtedly, depressing. Public-houses, darkened
like prisons, no longer invite the mob with bright
and vulgar windows. Cinematograph theatres are
as gloomy-fronted as though over their doors they
bore the motto : " Abandon hope, all ye who enter
here." Rather than venture into such a wilderness
of joylessness, many people prefer to sit at home
and play tiddleywinks. Or argue. How they argue!
Luckily, in the beginning, there were created, along
with the earth, a sun and a moon, and neither
policeman nor magistrate nor any other creature
has any power over them of regulation or control.
It is the moon that makes London by night beauti-
ful in war-time. It is the moon that makes the
north side of Trafalgar Square white with romance
like a Moorish city, and makes the South Kensing-
ton Museum itself appear as though it had been
built to music. London under the moon is a city of
wonder, a city of fair streets and fair citizens. Under
the moon the arc-lamps in their cowls no longer
affect us like sentinel killjoys. They seem feeble
and insignificant as dying torches when the moon-
light performs her miracles and exalts this city of
mean dwellings into a beauty equal to that of the
restless sea.

REVENGE

Revenge is a thing for which none of us in cold
blood has a good word to say. It is a ridiculous
property of melodrama. It is quite evident, how-
ever, to anyone who pays even a little attention to
the conversations going on everywhere around him
just now, that the spirit of revenge is alive and
kicking in the world at large. Indeed, if one
examines one's own heart after reading an account
of the latest exploits of the German machine of
horror in Belgium, one will probably find the spirit
of revenge alive and kicking there. It is at its
birth a generous instinct enough. It is the same
instinct that inspired the great opening of Milton's
sonnet :

"Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughtered saints whose

bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold."

One thinks of helpless men and women in the
grip of some swooping pestilence, of some beast
outside Nature, and one desires the utter destruction
of this evil thing with as little scruple as one desires
the end of an epidemic of scarlet fever. This is up
to a point justifiable even commendable. There
is no murder in wishing the death and burial of
Prussianism especially of Prussianism let loose in
Belgium. Prussianism, which is simply the per-
fected spirit of Imperialism, is a plague among the
nations. It is a burden of which the world must
get rid, or else the world as we know it at its best will
perish. It is quite reasonable to demand that, if

15

REVENGE

the Allies win in the present war, Prussianism will
be made impossible for the rest of history. It is
one thing, however, to wish to give the death blow
to Prussianism ; it is quite another thing to wish to
injure Germany or the German people. This is
where revenge comes in. The spirit of revenge is
a kind of unthinking justice, which is only satisfied
when every outrage has been answered by another
outrage. It would be glad to see the Allies repeat-
ing in Germany every incident of pillage and
massacre of which the Germans have been guilty
in Belgium. An instance of this spirit will be found
in the comment of a Londoner on the destruction
of Louvain : " Well, the Germans have cities that
are worth burning. There's Heidelberg. . . ."

One hears a good many things said about the
Kaiser which are friskings of the same spirit of
vengeance. I heard the other day a Territorial dis-
cussing what it would be best to do with the Kaiser
when he was caught. " I wouldn't send him to St.
Helena," he said; "that would be too honourable;
it would be treating him like Napoleon. As a mat-
ter of fact, I don't think we'll catch him. He's a
damned plucky chap, and I feel sure he'll die rather
than let himself be captured. But, if we do catch
him, I think he ought to be sent to 1'Ile du Diable
that place where Dreyfus was." I heard much
the same kind of conversation from a little burning-
eyed man who addressed me on the top of a bus in
Oxford Street as though I were a public meeting.
"The Kayser," he said, " do you know what I'd
like to do to him ? If I 'adn't a wife and three
children to provide for, nothing would give me more
satisfaction than to go out on the field of battle and
shoot 'im dead with my own 'and, if I was to die for
it the next minute." " 'Ear, 'ear," a lady with
peroxide hair turned round and interrupted him.
" People s'y," the little man went on contemptu-

16

REVENGE

ously, "send 'im to St. 'Elena. W'y should 'e live
in luxury in St. 'Elena? And I'm not sure if I
would shoot 'im. Shooteen's too honourable for 'im."
He tapped me on the knee confidentially. " I'd send
'im to Sigh-beria," he rasped, with the air of com-
mitting a dreadful secret to me, " there to live in
tawtcher ! " It may be retorted that the people who
talk like this do not mean what they say that, if
they did suddenly find themselves invested with
power of life and death over the Kaiser, they would
probably treat him as humanely as was consistent
with depriving him of opportunities to escape
or to repeat his crimes. Napoleon was regarded
until he was captured as a fiend almost too horrible
to be allowed to exist. Once he was captured, he
fascinated even the English sailors who carried him
away, We like to take our revenges these days in
words, not in deeds. We have lost most of the
delight our savage forefathers used to experience in
the physical sufferings of their enemies. We have
not yet, however, ceased entirely to delight in the
thought of these sufferings.

Revenge is certainly one of the oldest and most
natural of the passions. It is as old as the day on
which Moses slew the Egyptian. It goes back to the
year in which Achilles dragged the body of Hector
round the walls of Troy. It is still a powerful force
in the lives of many subject nationalities. The Finn
and the Pole can appreciate the motives of Moses
to-day at least they could yesterday. Revenges,
such as the assassination of Bobrikoff, are regarded
as executions rather than murders. There are cases
of revenge, indeed, with which nearly all of us would
be half in sympathy even if we felt bound to disap-
prove of them. The man who avenges an injury
done to his wife or his children is seldom regarded
as a criminal on the same level as the man who
avenges an injury merely to himself. Most of us

17 c

REVENGE

would admit that there are two kinds of revenge
the selfish and the unselfish and that in unselfish
revenge there is a quality of nobleness. One of the
greatest heroes of every generous schoolboy's imagi-
nation is Hannibal, sworn from his childhood to
vengeance upon Rome. We are still capable of this
national vengefulness, though the moralists do not
encourage it. The Irish, we may be sure, charged
all the more resolutely at Fontenoy, owing to their
watchword, " Remember Limerick ! " The desire
to settle national accounts of this kind is deep-seated
and a powerful motive in war. One would expect
that, in the present war, the French would fight with
greater determination than any of their allies, owing
to their long-expressed desire to avenge the humilia-
tions of 1870. If they do not do so, it is because
organisation is even more effective than the spirit of
revenge. Certainly, one has no desire to see venge-
ance proved efficient. It never does settle accounts
in a final manner. We see in every record of feud
or vendetta a foolish give-and-take of crime, to which
there is no logical end but the extermination of one
side. A Capulet kills a Montague, who has to be
avenged. A Capulet is killed, and again vengeance
must be taken. Kill another Montague, and another
Capulet must perish. However one's sympathies may
lie at the beginning of the feud, before long the
imagination sickens at this monotonous serial of
murder. Sooner or later the heart turns to magna-
nimity for relief. It might equally well have begun
with it. Both in private and public life we find that
vengeance sets us sliding down an inclined plane of
folly.

One has an excellent example of this in the
relations between Protestants and Catholics during,
at least, two centuries. Mary burned Protestants
in England; Elizabeth massacred Catholics in
Ireland. France maltreated Protestants; Eng-

18

REVENGE

land in retort outlawed Catholics. Each could
or at least did always point to some previous
crime committed by the other to justify its own
crime. One found the same criminal tit-for-tat
in Ulster only yesterday, when an attack on a
Protestant Sunday-school excursion at Castledawson
was answered by outrages upon Catholics in the
Belfast shipyards. The history of the present war
has been full of the small change of revenge.
Germans were nearly kicked to death by the mob
in the streets of Brussels. Englishmen had perilous
experiences at the hands of the mob in Berlin.
Outrages of this kind, in all probability, have not
been so general as the Press has made out. I am
sure that, if stories of humanity made as sensational
" copy " as stories of brutality, the papers would
have been as full of the former as of the latter.
The Press, however, thrives on the spirit of ven-
geance. The German Press is eager to rouse the
spirit of vengeance in the German people. The
English Press or a part of it is eager to rouse
the spirit of vengeance in the English people. Con-
sequently, each country hears a good deal more
than the worst of the other, and a good deal less
than the best. I do not mean to suggest that the
armies of the Allies have committed crimes such as
the burning of Louvain or that the guilt of the
Germans is not colossal. But one prefers to see
the peoples spurred on to fight chivalrously rather
than in the spirit of wild revenge. One would
not like to see the armies of the Allies devoured
with a passion for answering outrage with outrage,
horror with horror. One has no love for this book-
keeping in murder.

Outrages should incite us to overthrow the out-
rager. That is all. The women he has defiled
cannot be restored to happiness by the unhappiness
of yet other women. A dead German child will

19

REVENGE

not bring a dead Belgian child to life again.
Louvain will not rise from its ashes even though
you burn down Heidelberg to the last book in its
libraries. One can see at once what a world of
futilities one would be led into by revenge. The
truth isthat in thisworld it isalmost always impossible
to make the punishment fit the crime without
becoming a criminal oneself and a futile one at
that. Among primitive races men resort to torture
in order to inflict adequate punishment on the
guilty. Civilised peoples have again and again
reverted to this method of barbarism ; indeed, they
clung to it with bitter faith till within the last
century. It would be difficult to show that it ever
lessened crime. It has been ineffective as a weapon
of virtue and has in a hundred cases been turned
against the most virtuous citizens in the State.
Nobody now approves in theory, at least of
vindictiveness in punishment. We believe almost
as little in cruelty to criminals as in cruelty to
children. We would not break a man on the
wheel or torture him on the rack or burn him
over a slow fire, no matter how abominable his
crime. It is not that he might not deserve it. It
is simply that we feel we should become base our-
selves in answering his crime in that way. This,
I admit, is armchair philosophy. If one were a
Belgian if one had seen one's home devastated,
one's women violated, one's dwellings razed to the
ground one would no doubt see red in one's hatred
of so remorseless an enemy. One might even
though, I confess, I do not see how any but the
unimaginative or the distraught could feel such a
rage as the Psalmist felt when he desired God to
dash the heads of the little children of his enemies
against the stones. On the other hand, when one
thinks the matter out calmly, one can see no clear
and honest way of revenge but to heap coals of fire

20

REVENGE

on an enemy's head. When one hears that the
crew of a German mine-layer has been rescued
from death by British sailors, one knows that the
British sailors have done the right thing. That is
the only kind of revenge which does not darken the
light of the sun the revenge of magnanimity.

THE ASS

Many authors have written in defence of the goat,
the goose, and the ass. They have contended, and
not without a good show of argument, that the goat,
the goose, and the ass are maligned and beautiful
animals. Mr. W. H. Hudson has written an apol-
ogia for the goose which is one of the most attractive
of contemporary essays. So far as I can remember,
one of his brightest examples of intelligence in the
goose family was a gander which tried to open a
gate by pushing it with the flat of its foot. Probably,
if one were sufficiently intimate with the higher life
of the goat, one would be able to quote a parallel
miracle of good sense. But, in spite of all the artists
and naturalists have done on behalf of the reputation
of these three animals, the world at large, following
the tradition, has insisted upon regarding them as
patterns of brainlessness, stubbornness, and noise.

Of the three, the ass has suffered most from
abuse. At the same time it has also been the most
glorified. It appears and reappears in paintings of
the life of Christ like a household pet. One sees it
pacing the little winding roads among the little hills
in a hundred pictures of the Holy Family. The very
cross upon its back is said to have been bestowed
upon it as a memento of the day on which it bore
Christ over the palms into Jerusalem. The Chris-
tian Church in some parts of Europe at one period
held a festival in its honour on the I4th of January
in commemoration of the Flight into Egypt. During
the feast, as it was observed at Beauvais so we are
told in all the books on the medieval drama an ass,
ridden by a beautiful girl carrying a baby or doll,

32

THE ASS

was led into the church to hear Mass, and, as the
service went on, the people honoured it by chanting
" Hee-haw " wherever the responses should have
been given. The ass, which at times seems to have
been a wooden figure, was greeted, we are told, with
an address, a part of which has been translated,
" From the Eastern lands the Ass is come, beautiful
and very brave, well fitted to bear burdens. Up, Sir
Ass, and sing ! Open your pretty mouth. Hay will
be yours in plenty and oats in abundance." At the
end of the service the priest brayed instead of saying
Itf, missa est, and the congregation responded with a
triple "Hee-haw! Hee-haw! Hee-haw!" This
may in its origin have been a festival in praise of an
ass's good deeds. But it was clearly transformed in
time into a festival of the comic sense at which men
purged themselves of the arrears of blasphemy and
irreverence that were stored up in their bosoms.
The ass became a means of insult, not an object of
worship; and since the Middle Ages it has been the
men of letters rather than the priests who have
regarded it with something like affectionate esteem.
It is possible that the veneration of the ass may in
some way be descended from some pre-Christian
form of ass-worship. The Egyptians worshipped
Seth in the similitude of an ass, and one of the
scandalous charges against the Jews was that they
were ass-worshippers, or, in the more learned word,
onolaters. They were believed even to fatten some
profane person, such as a Greek, every five years,
to sacrifice to their ass-deity. The scandal was
afterwards transferred to the Christians, and Tertul-
lian has left a story of an apostate Jew who carried
an ass-eared figure through the streets of Carthage,
with an inscription saying that this was the god of
the Christians. A third-century caricature of the
Crucifixion, in which the figure on the cross has an
ass's head, is suggestive of the popularity of the ass

23

THE ASS

legend, and some authorities have even seen a
mockery of the Christian religion in the fantastic
humour of the Golden Ass of Apuleius. It will be
seen that the ass has had a harlequin career. He
has been a god, and he has supplied a head to Bot-
tom the weaver. Mr. Wells, in one of the most
brilliant satires of Boon, has further proclaimed the
beast's presence in the House of Commons and in
the offices of British newspapers, and has stated one
of the great problems of the hour as the problem of
driving the wild asses of the Devil back into Hell.

There is certainly no greater peril to the world
than the ass. There is also no greater peril to the
ass than the ass. It was the asininity of the Stuarts
which lost them the English throne. It was the
stubborn asininity of George III. which lost Eng-
land the American colonies. It was to the asininity
of Marie Antoinette that was partly due the un-
governable rage of the French Revolution. History
is an epic of the destruction of asses or of the
destruction which asses have brought upon innocent
people. The ass has cut this prominent figure
in history because its stubbornness is more lasting
than character and more persistent than wisdom.
The wise man will get tired of being wise before
the ass gets tired of being an ass. That is the
ass's strength. Its bray echoes down the centuries
like the voice of a conqueror. It has invaded not
only the sanctuary, but politics, literature and the
arts. For the most part, each generation forgets
the asses of the generation before. Even when a
Pope writes a Dunciad we find it difficult to read.
We become overwhelmed in the presence of such
a multitude of asses. We feel we have enough of
our own. And yet, unless we realise what the
human ass has accomplished in past ages, we shall
be in danger of underestimating the peril he is to
our own time. Had it not been for the ass, it is

2 4

THE ASS

possible that we should have arrived at the New
Jerusalem, or by whatever name you prefer to call
the golden city, long ago. But the ass has always
insisted upon knowing better than anyone else, and,
on the plea that it objected to its present driver,
has lain down at the side of the muddy road. It
always seems to be suggesting that, if it only had
another driver, it would proceed on its journey at
a gallop. But give it another driver, and it still
protests. Of all animals it is said to have almost
the least social sense. It is infinitely less responsive
than a cat. If only the asses could unite together
they would make the world an impossible place to
live in. But they do not even understand that group-
consciousness which, in one of its forms, we call
patriotism. They indulge in a " Hee-haw " patriot-
ism of their own, it is true, but it seldom gets
beyond a " Hee-haw." It is merely a bray and
obstructiveness. Soon the face resumes its placid
insensibility. The ass is as unteachable as he is
serious-looking. He always looks serious, even at
times at which one suspects him of something like
frivolity. There was an asinine seriousness about
the proceedings of a local body the other day which
ordered the deletion of a German manufacturer's
name from the face of the municipal clock. Ob-
viously, the adult males who passed a resolution
to this effect had utterly failed to realise that we
are in the midst of the most serious crisis that has
come upon the world for more than a century. No
one with what is called horse-sense could have ever
dreamed that the cause of freedom in Europe could
be aided by scratching a few letters off the face of a
clock. But it is exactly the sort of idea which
appeals to the ass-sense of human beings. A few
days later appeared a letter from a gentleman urging
his fellow-countrymen to imitate the example of
this body in regard to the names of London streets

25

THE ASS

and squares. He said that it was a national disgrace
that London should possess a Teutonically-named
Hanover Square. Luckily, diversions of this kind
from the serious business of the war have very little
effect. But they are sufficiently numerous to
suggest that the ass is a far from extinct animal in
England.

And there are much more serious cases than this.
There are a number of gentlemen with seats in the
Houses of Parliament whose minds are continually
busy with the same kind of serious frivolities and
obstinate inanities. The finest materials for the
natural history of the ass exist not in Buffon, but
in Hansard. One authority upon asses has written
that "it would be interesting to find out what were
the different conditions that made one variety of
wild ass a shy animal and another variety of ass an
inquisitive animal." As to the conditions I do not
propose to discuss them. But as to the existence
of the inquisitive "variety of ass "do not every
day's Parliamentary reports bear painful witness to
it ? First, there is the kind that asks whether the
Home Office is aware that a little girl whose grand-
mother, though born in Italy, had a German step-
aunt, is employed on a sewing-machine in the
neighbourhood of a munitions factory in Bubbletown,
and whether he will undertake to have her interned
without further delay. Then there is the sort that
asks whether it is the case that Lord Haldane was
seen eating sausages during a recent visit to Switzer-
land, whether this is not evidence of pro-German
sympathies, whether the Government commissioned
him to eat the sausages, and whether the sausages
were paid for at the nation's expense or out of Lord
Haldane's own pocket. Yet a third variety is in-
quisitive about neutrals. It does not exactly know
what a neutral is. It regards " neutral " as a word
which means somebody who ought to be hostile to

THE ASS

Germany, but isn't. It thinks that the word ought
to mean one who is at the beck and call of the
Allies. This kind of " inquisitive animal " would in
all probability denounce America for having aban-
doned her neutrality if she were able and willing to
supply munitions to Germany as she has done to
England. He "hee-haws" about small nations
when Belgium is mentioned, but when he is roused
against Holland or Greece he declares his readiness
to make war on them as "petty States." It is im-
possible for him to get it into his head that, though
the passage of contraband goods into Germany may
be a serious matter, it would be still more serious
to add a new ally to the armies of the Central
Powers. He is ready to challenge all the nations
of the earth. He regards the Foreign Office ap-
parently as an institution which exists for the
purpose of smuggling meat and munitions into
Germany. He will trust no Foreign Office which
does not put neutrals under lock and key. He
contributes nothing but noise and obstinacy to a
situation which demands, above all things, brains.
One scarcely knows whether he is more stupid or
mischievous. Mrs. Wharton in her book on Fight-
ing France observes that, in her opinion, the fine
and determined spirit in which the French are
waging the war is due above all to their national
intelligence. There is abundance of intelligence
in England, too, but there is a constant danger of
its being of no avail owing to the obstinate and
opinionated quadrupeds that are continually setting
themselves across its path. On the side of asininity
the gods themselves fight in vain, and, though it
was geese that saved the Roman Capitol, one may
be quite sure that it is not asses that are going to
save the imperilled freedom of Europe.

FAREWELL TO TREATING

It would be interesting to make a register of the
adult males of England in terms of those who
never go into a public-house from one year's end
to the other, those who sometimes do so, and those
who regularly do so. The last two classes, I imagine,
would greatly outnumber the first. England is a
public-house-going nation. She drank beer under
the sign of the Seven Stars and rested the soles of
her feet in the sawdust at the bar of the Salutation
and Cat long before Columbus lost himself at sea
or Isaac Newton began to take note of falling apples.
Is not the very word " public-house " an epitome of
the history of a nation's pleasure ? The bishops have
never succeeded in making the churches public-houses
in the degree in which the inns are public-houses.
There have been periods in history when men have
been compelled by law to go to church, but no law
was ever needed to drive a man into an inn. He
has found here as nowhere else the medicine of
fancy, the elixir vitae. He has found here a true
house of peers, in which Oliver Cromwell's ideal
that every Jack shall be a gentleman is realised
as it has not yet been realised in politics. The
public-houses in cities are not, I admit, so demo-
cratic as that. Their public bars and private bars
and saloon bars and jug-and-bottle entrances wall
off the classes from each other like animals in cages,
and in some of them even a row of little shutters,
at the height of a man's face, conceals the respect-
able tradesman from his carter who may be roaring
in the four-ale bar. None the less, the public-house
is, on the whole, a place of relaxation and friendliness.

2$

FAREWELL TO TREATING

Men who have left their homes with sour faces
here find no difficulty in beaming upon perfect
strangers. The same man who has just argued
himself too poor to afford to buy his child a
pair of shoes that will keep out the rain, here
swells into a balloon of generosity and becomes a
prince of the golden age while the money lasts.
Such an atmosphere of generosity, indeed, dwells
in the public-house like a guardian spirit that the
law has had on more than one occasion to step in
and forbid men to be excessively friends with one
another. Thus it was made illegal for wages to
be paid in public houses, for fear that men in a
wild intoxication of brotherhood might pour out
their gold like a gift. And now comes the no-
treating order as another fetter upon this easy
traditional charity. It is no longer possible to
pay for another man's drink in a London public-
house, whether he be your friend or whether he
be one of those homeless nightbirds with the
sadness of defeat in their hollow eyes, for whom
all is lost save beer.

Many writers have, during the last few months,
been denouncing the treating system as the root
of much evil, and I have no doubt that it has
often resulted in men drinking far more than they
either wished or had a head for. Treating was
not always so voluntary, such a matter of goodwill,
as it appeared. Sometimes one was practically
compelled to treat ; at other times one was practi-
cally compelled to be treated. The second of the
alternatives was, perhaps, the more painful. There
were youths of a certain class and at a certain stage
of riotousness who took it as a personal insult if an
acquaintance did not drink with them, and having
won their point in regard to this, also took it as a
personal insult if the drink ordered were not of a
sufficiently strong variety. Ginger ale and lemonade

29

FAREWELL TO TREATING

they hated as the Devil is said to hate holy water.
Sometimes they flatly refused to pay for " soft
drinks" of this kind. They glowered upon the
drinker of shandygaff as a Laodicean. They justly
abominated the man, being above seventeen years of
age, who called for public-house claret. To be treated
by men of this kind was something of a servitude.
At times the victim of the tyrannies of treating
could be seen stealthily pouring an undesired glass
of whiskey into a flower-pot, into a fire-place, on
the floor, anywhere except down his throat. But
this has always been regarded as an outrage upon
hospitality, and the perpetrator of such a deed
has earned the black opinions of good and bad
men alike.

It would be absurd, however, to pretend that
the treating system put all of us to such discomforts
and shifts. Many men protested against a second
third, fourth or fourteenth drink, but their protests
were half-hearted, or they would have got up and
gone home. The protester was usually a kingdom
divided against itself. Reason sternly said one
thing, and a smiling stomach or was it a smiling
heart? said another. It was only a rationalist
of the strictest sect, who, having attained to a
certain hazy and golden view of the world, could
without a pang, rise up and go out into the streets
of disillusion. It was a kind of anticipation of
death. For convinced and professional drinkers
the end of the world came every night with the
monotonous cry of the pot-boy, "Time, gentlemen,
please!" and the final clanging of the doors. From the
company of rosy-faced friends they went out among
skeletons and shadows. Their wills still hovered
among the fumes and tobacco smoke of those haunts
of friendship after their departure, as the souls in
Plato are still bound after death to their earthly
desires. They had had playmates, they had had

3

FAREWELL TO TREATING

companions, and now they were as chill and
solitary as a ghost under the moon. These, it
may be urged, are not the typical good fellows of
the public-houses, but diseased specimens, creatures
of one idea. This may be, but they are in the
tradition of social drinking in a degree their sober
contemporaries are not. They are heirs of the
Mermaid Tavern, of the days of Steele and Addison,
of the days of Pitt and Fox and Sheridan, of the
days of Lamb and Coleridge. They are the
brothers of Falstaff, now sunk upon tradesman
days and grown leaner at the waist. They are
proportionately fewer now than they have been for
centuries, but even to-day they are more numerous
than the Knights of the Round Table. Or were
so yesterday. And now the war has killed them.

At least it has struck at their self-respect a blow
from which it will not easily recover. Hitherto
they were able to gather round the bar as models
of altruism. Theirs was a freemasonry of fellowship.
The give-and-take of drink warmed them like virtue
in action. Each man, as it were, drank not only
his private whiskey or beer, but a communal nectar.
Now that the law has forbidden treating, however,
if a man is to go on drinking with his friends,
he will have an uneasy feeling that he is drinking
alone that he is, in the slang term of reproach, a
" dumb boozer." He will be paying for himself all the
time instead of for others. He will be the sort of
person he has always wanted to kick, since he was a
tiny boy and hated his school-fellow for eating
sweets by himself and never offering to share them.
If he grows redder as to the nose and blotchier as
to the face, he will no longer be able to tell himself,
forgivingly, " That is the price of being a good
fellow." These things will henceforth seem the
emblems of self-indulgence, and worthier of a place
in a teetotaler's tract than in a good man's counte-

FAREWELL TO TREATING

nance. To tell the truth, the no-treating order
has taken the virtue out of drinking. After all, men
did drink out of charitableness as well as from
thirst, and it was not entirely to their discredit.
That is why I would say a very gentle farewell to
all those walking bonfires of bibulousness which
are now being quenched, I admit, but nevertheless,
may they smoulder in peace !

Hapless, too, is the case of the sponger, the
cheerful Jack Point of the public-houses, he who
could entertain all day with his conversation the
meanest and the stupidest of mankind, provided only
his tankard was kept full. He was often the
brightest figure in the public-house sometimes
the best-dressed. He was fond of boasting of his
relationship with some great personage a states-
man, a peer, or a man of letters. His eye never
wearied of gleaming as, making use of the ancient
jest, he deduced his downfall from " slow horses
and fast women." Sometimes he was a broken-
down actor, sometimes he was a broken-down
doctor. In either case he was always ready to accept
drink, and, a moment later, tobacco, and then he
would hold his host by the elbow in a little
whispered conference, during which the question
of a small loan anything up to a million and down to
twopence would be discussed. What will happen
to that lean champion of the breed who used to
come through the doors like Hamlet, uttering
" Oho ! " in every kind of voice, from the sepulchral
to the triumphant ? Perhaps he has been dead
for years. If he is not, how fallen on evil days !
How very sepulchral his " Oho ! " must have grown
by this time ! How starved his mirth ! No more,
at mention of a drink, will he look with dreaming
eyes into the face of his benefactor, and say :
" ' Kind hearts are more than coronets and simple
faith than Norman blood.'

32

FAREWELL TO TREATING

Tennyson, my boy, Tennyson. Do you know it ? "
No more, after the second hour of drinking, will
he raise the question of what character in literature
he most resembles, answering the question himself,
" Sydney Carton," and then melancholily adding,
" all but the bravery." Farewell, a long farewell,
to all his drinking ! He, too, has been quenched
in these labouring days. Pity his passing, and be
not too severe on one who was after all a not too
distant relation of Jack Falstaff.

33

REFUGEES

London is, I imagine, at the present time fuller of
refugees than she has ever been at any period in her
history. Belgium presents a spectacle such as has
not previously been known in our time. She is a
nation in flight. One cannot pass down the Strand
without seeing evidence of this tragic migration.
Red 'buses carry her refugees in batches to the doors
of relief offices, where men, women, and children, with
their pathetic packages, dismount with the air of
people who live in perpetual rain. They do not look
exactly like figures in a grand tragedy. They simply
look dismal, as if they had had a bad crossing ; they
are washed out like women who have been sitting
up all night with a dying man. Some of them are
fortunately stolid, and accept their fate without
losing the colour from their cheeks. But as one
allows oneself to realise the meaning of this proces-
sion of homeless people in actual suffering, one can-
not doubt that one is witnessing one of the most
heartbreaking of the world's tragedies. Think for a
moment what it would be to have London, or Glas-
gow, or Dublin in flight in this manner what it
must be to have a modern city foundering like the
Titanic and its citizens scrambling out for dear life,
and with no time to gather up all those little follies
of property which yesterday were the main source
of one's pride in being alive. One can fancy the
wild march of the millions of London ladies from
Mayfair, hooligans, poets, grocers, publicans' assist-
ants, navvies, clerks, children from the slums, old
men, milliners, newsboys, coal-heavers, mothers
toiling, with something of the lost look of Napoleon's

34

REFUGEES

army retreating from Moscow, along the roads that
led to the harbours where the boats for America lay.
One's property would have become worthless as dust
in a single night ; one's home, one's world in little,
no better than a barn. There are, no doubt, many
of the more prosperous Belgian refugees who have
not been left quite so impoverished as that. But
how many thousands there must be whose fortune is
scarcely more than the clothes on their backs ! That
is a fate which might befall any of us so long as the
era of wars of conquest lasts. In justice, indeed, one
would think it ought to have fallen on almost any of
us rather than the Belgians. They are not sufferers
from any ambition of their own. They suffer simply
because they happened to be in the way.

There is no figure in legend or history that makes
a greater appeal to the imagination than the fugitive,
whether it be Cain flying from the side of his
murdered brother, or Lot and his wife escaping from
the cities of the plain, or Noah and his caravan of
two-legged and four-legged animals going aboard the
ark with the threat of the floods pursuing them.
There are few incidents which seem in the same
measure to gather up into themselves all the world's
romance as the flight of Joseph and Mary and the
Child into Egypt. In glancing back over history,
indeed, one can almost persuade oneself that it is the
fugitives that have inherited the earth. Half the
great characters in history seem to have been fugi-
tives at one time or another, from Moses to Plato,
from the Christian Apostles to Mazzini. One sees
in the Jews an example of an entire race of refugees,
and in the United States of America an instance of a
nation with refugees for its first fine citizens and its
patron saints. The world owes almost more to its
runaways than to its soldiers. Every student of
industrial history knows the debt of England to
fugitives from France and Flanders. Low Country-

35

REFUGEES

men brought cotton to Lancashire. It was the
Flemish weavers flying from the Spaniards who
brought over the silk manufacture. Huguenots took
linen to Ireland. Glassmaking came with refugees
from France and Italy. It is probable that nations
owe far more to being invaded by refugees than to
being invaded by conquerors. It is refugees, not con-
querors, who are the advance guard of international-
ism. It is they and not the warriors who spread
culture over the earth. None the less there is
infinite tragedy in their fate. One thinks of the
evicted nation as a crucified nation. There is hardly
anything which human beings dread more than exile.
I do not mean by this the voluntary exile of the
adventurer, the colonist. That is one of the lures of
youth. It is a step into the light. Real exile is
another matter. It is an escape as it were from a
falling house, a flight into the unknown. Not always
is the exile in the bitter case of those wanderers who
sat down and wept by the waters of Babylon. But
if he is conscious of his exile, the world cannot but
be a vast prison to him. There is no liberty for the
man who has not the liberty to go home. The
refugee is a man driven out with a flaming sword.
The world had its fill of Russian, Italian, Polish, and
Irish exiles in the nineteenth century. So numerous
were they that a new nation might have been made
of them. They were so abundant that people in the
end began to get a little tired and even to see the
funny side of them. Not all of them had the pas-
sionate dignity of Mazzini, who wore mourning for
his country as though it were in the grave. But even
Mazzini rather puzzled some of his friends in
England as though he were a monomaniac, a man
with a fixed idea. Probably one does become a man
with a fixed idea if one is without a country, just as
one would become a man with a fixed idea if one
were without food. It may be that it is easier to live

36

REFUGEES

without a country than without food : the way we
see Germans and Irish settling down in America and
forgetting their old homes suggests that it is. But
even they, one imagines, never quite forget the skies
they have deserted for the commoner skies they have
taken in exchange. They would not go home except
for a holiday, but the songs they like best to sing are
songs about home. They would feel traitors and
runaways if they did not pay this lip-service on at
least one day in the year to the country of their
birth. That it is so often mere lip-service, is, per-
haps, the reason that has made Turgenev and Mr.
Conrad so severe on the Russian exile. One remem-
bers, too, Mr. Kipling's parody on the " Exile of
Erin " who had no sooner set foot in America than

"He was Alderman Mike inthroducin' a Bill."

Unfortunately, Mr. Kipling is constitutionally unfit
to distinguish between the tragic kind of exile and
the comic kind of exile. He is the grand indicter of
the unsuccessful races, and he does not recognise the
right of the loser in the fight to carry his sorrows
with him to a home that is no home in a strange
land.

In this Mr. Kipling is at odds with the sense of
the human race. Man has from very early times
regarded the fugitive as in some manner a sacred per-
son. He has provided in his temples and his churches
a sanctuary where the pursuer cannot reach him.
Even the murderer flying from justice could claim
the right to be left unharmed when once he had
gained the seat of sanctuary beside the altar. So
strong is the human instinct for punishment, how-
ever, that the right of sanctuary was in many
countries, like Germany, denied to murderers and
other criminals. But the idea of a sanctuary or some
similar place of refuge prevailed unto comparatively

37

REFUGEES

modern times in most countries. The criminals of
London used to gather and defy the law in that part
of the city which lies between Fleet Street and the
Thames Alsatia, as it was called. Possibly some
instinct in us, something deeply rooted in the religi-
ous spirit, tells us that we are all in some sort
refugees, whether we picture ourselves as flying from
the Hound of Heaven or from the wrath to come.
And in still another sense the human race has often
been depicted as a race of exiles. We are exiles, if
not fugitives, from the perfect city. We are sojourners
and strangers under the sun : we build houses of
a day in the valleys of death. There seems to be no
patriotism of the earth for many of those, like St.
Paul, whose patriotism is in Heaven. Their psalms
and hymns are like native songs remembered by
those who will admit no citizenship here. The
saint is still a foreigner in every land, a sorrowing
refugee from skies not ours. Most of us, however,
make our reconciliation with the earth and become
her naturalised subjects; a few, like Meredith, even
find in her a goddess to worship. But it may be
doubted whether the greatest worldling among us
is not sometimes haunted by the feeling that he has
no home on the earth save as a naturalised alien.

And so, in the last analysis, these refugees, with
their little scraps of red, yellow, and black ribbon
on their breasts, who run into us at every street
corner, are nearer to us than cousins ; they are our
images and shadows. They are types of a race
that comes and goes like the swallows and have no
continuing city upon earth. They are doubly
stricken, however. They fly from a double doom.
They are pursued not only by the terror of death,
but by the terror of life. They are poor, blind
things in a rout, broken families, mothers who have
lost their children, helpless as cattle on a ship
during a gale. One realises something of the

38

REFUGEES

endless tragedy of their case when ope reads how
some of them leave notices chalked up on walls and
doors along the roads as signals to their friends :

Pieter Vaubelle is at Putte.
Jan Dewilde, come home.
Louis Vernilge, where are you ?

It is the restoration of these poor, lost creatures to
the kingdom of their old lives and liberties that is
the object for which one most immediately and
passionately longs in this war. In the inhuman
dispersal of the Belgian people we see the darkest
condemnation of the German cause.

39

COWARD CONSCIENCE

It is impossible to follow the procession of excuses
with which one German apologist after another
attemps to justify the violation of Belgian nation-
ality a still more abominable crime, by the way,
than the violation of Belgian neutrality without
being reminded of ^Esop's fable of The Wolf and the
Lamb :

" As a wolf was lapping at the head of a running
brook he spied a stray lamb paddling at some
distance down the stream. Having made up his
mind to seize her, he bethought himself how he
might justify his violence. ' Villain ! ' said he,
running up to her, * how dare you muddle the water
that I am drinking?' 'Indeed,' said the Lamb humbly,
' I do not see how I can disturb the water, since it
runs from you to me, not from me to you.' ' Be
that as it may,' replied the Wolf, ' it is but a year
ago that you called me many ill names.' 'Oh, sir!'
said the Lamb, trembling, ' a year ago I was not
born.' 'Well,' replied the Wolf, 'if it was not you
it was your father, and that is all the same ; but it
is no use trying to argue me out of my supper '
and without another word he fell upon the poor,
helpless Lamb and tore her to pieces."

"A tyrant," runs the moral of the story, "can
always find a plea for his tyranny."

It must be a constant source of amazement to the
angels that so few of us mortals have the courage of
our crimes. We go about restlessly seeking some
means by which we may excuse them as virtues.

40

COWARD CONSCIENCE

Not one in a million of us can lay claim to the " robust
conscience " which that taloned young creature,
Hilda Wangel, used to desire in her heroes. Our
consciences are yellow cowards which have no more
appetite for sin than a boy in the preparatory school
for plug tobacco. They could sit down heartily to
a table of sins so long as these were cooked into
imitations of the virtues, just as any of us might
make a cheerful enough meal on the flesh of horses
or cats provided they were disguised as oxtails or
rabbit or stewed beans. Every one has heard of
the man who had eaten a plate of horseflesh with
relish under the idea that it was Christian food, and
who, on hearing what he had eaten, at once became
violently sick. Conscience is not usually so squeam-
ish as that. Having by error got its teeth into
iniquity, it decides, as a rule, to make the best of
a bad business that is, to pull a long face and say
no more about it.

But why is it that we cannot be honest in our
immorality ? Why is that we cannot say, " Evil, be
thou my good," and openly live in that midnight
philosophy ? It may be that we are afraid of
shocking others because we know that most of our
plans depend upon the good will of others for
their accomplishment. But surely it would be
possible to found a secret society of evil men who
would be bound by self-interest, if not by the
virtue of an oath to push each other to success.
I cannot think it is entirely the opinion of others
that forces us all to study with such passion the
grammar and accent of virtue. It is for our own
satisfaction, and not for our neighbours, that we
thus practise the gait and speech of morality. Let
our consciences lose their hold on good or, at
least, the pretence of it and we feel as helpless as if
we were in a ship that had lost its rudder. It may
be only nervousness at having wandered outside

41

COWARD CONSCIENCE

the conventions : possibly we would be as chicken-
hearted in presence of new virtues as of new sins.
Even so, however, our alarm before new virtues
is usually due to the fact that we regard them as
sins. They seem like outrages on the standard of
virtue under which we are gathered. It is necessary
to our peace of mind that we should never feel we
have betrayed that flag. Everything we do we
must be able to represent to ourselves as something
done in service to it. Conscience would assail us as
traitors if we boldly changed our allegiance to the
flag of evil. The truth is, we are slaves to virtue
or to whatever can dress itself out as virtue as surely
as though our flesh and blood had been sold to it in
some savage market-place.

There are more than one possible explanations of
this Egyptian bondage. It may be the result of a
thirst for righteousness, as natural as our thirst for
air. Or it may simply be due to fear of the
penalties for ill-doing. We know that Nature and
society have each their retinue of spies and execu-
tioners, and that neither Nature nor society is likely
to let us off until they have exacted the uttermost
farthing. Probably in most of us, there is an
inconstant balance of righteousness and fear. It is
the same with nations and individuals. They feel
partly a desire for righteousness and partly that
they can only betray righteousness at their peril.
Man, however, has been a deceiving animal ever
since he made acquaintance with the serpent. The
history of magic is the history of a foolish race
which has always believed it possible to make an
imitation of a thing which would be as good in most
ways as the thing itself. Imitative magic was
supposed to command the heavens, to give one
power over one's enemies, to deceive the listening
gods. If you called a child by a name not its own,
it was believed that the gods would not know of

42

COWARD CONSCIENCE

its existence, and so would not compass its death,
just as if we call sin a virtue, we still believe that
the gods will somehow or other be tricked, and will,
therefore, not be tempted to punish it. That is
how it comes that Germany has been driven to
explain that her invasion of Belgium was Russia's
fault, or France's fault, or England's fault, or even
Belgium's fault ; the last thing she is willing to
admit is that it was one of those simple selfish
crimes which Empires have committed over and
over again, since the day on which the first con-
queror led out his naked followers with their
bloody stone hatchets. Germany calls deliberate
aggression self-defence, and thinks that by doing
so she has succeeded in squaring things with
Rhadamanthus. On the whole, one would be more
inclined to respect her if she would blaspheme
Rhadamanthus and avow herself unjust and an
unbeliever. Or would one not ? It may be that
one gets a certain comfort from seeing a nation
taking off its hat to justice even if it passes by on
the other side.

So long as a man professes a belief in virtue, we
feel that at least we who also profess a belief in
virtue have some common ground upon which to
argue. To attempt to make the worse appear the
better reason is in itself to pay a sort of homage to
the better reason. When the average anti-Socialist
used to denounce Socialists and Trade Unionists
as persons who would interfere with freedom of
contract the freedom of the worker usually being
either to starve or to take what was offered to him
he appealed to a fine ideal in a false way. Men's
consciences, however they may allow them to throw
justice and decency to the winds in real life, will
never allow them to throw justice and decency to
the winds as aids to an argument. They are
as unscrupulous in their profession of good as in

43

COWARD CONSCIENCE

their practice of evil. The human race is never so
dishonest as when it argues. There were many
admirable examples of dishonesty in argument during
the recent fight against the Home Rule Bill. The
only argument which the Unionists did not use was
the honest argument of selfishness the argument
that Ireland must not have self-government because
they believed that it was to the interest of their
country and their party that Ireland should remain
in subjection. Instead of this they argued, on the
one hand, that Ireland was so loyal that she had
ceased to want Home Rule, and, on the other, that
she was so disloyal that she wanted separation.
They protested that Ireland was so poor that she
could not afford Home Rule, and, at the same time,
that she was so prosperous that she did not need it.
They declared that Ireland enjoyed equal rights
with England by being allowed to send representa-
tives to a Parliament in London, yet in the next
breath they denied that Ulster would enjoy equal
rights with the rest of Ireland by being allowed to
send representatives to a Parliament in Dublin.
They ridiculed the idea of treating Ireland as a
separate entity and swore violently when anyone
refused to treat Ulster as a separate entity. They
urged Protestants to fight against Home Rule on
the ground that it would hand Ireland over to
Popery, and they urged Catholics to fight against
Home Rule on the ground that it would hand over
Ireland to anti-clericalism, ^sop's Wolf was not
half so ingenious in its argument with the Lamb as
these Unionists were in discovering new reasons
for making a meal of Ireland. And the worst of it
is, so little active intelligence do even the virtuous
possess, that many sincere and kindly people were
taken in by this sleight-of-tongue. That is what
drives one to despair. No honest Englishman could
have used such arguments for the subjection of

44

COWARD CONSCIENCE

Ireland, just as no honest German could use the
ordinary Prussian arguments for the overrunning
of Belgium. But it is always possible to invent a
case by which any number of sincere and kindly
people will be taken in. We who are able to see
the tragedy of King Lear as a whole are not likely
to take sides against him with his cruel daughters.
But suppose we had been his contemporaries. How
could we have withstood the sweet reasonableness
of Goneril's statement of her side of the case for
getting rid of the old man and his retinue :

" I do beseech you
To understand my purposes aright :
As you are old and reverend, you should be wise,
Here do you keep a hundred knights and squires ;
Men so disorder'd, so debosh'd and bold,
That this our court, infected with their manners,
Shows like a riotous inn : epicurism and lust
Make it more like a tavern or a brothel
Than a graced palace. The shame itself doth speak
For instant remedy."

There you have coward conscience, eloquent and
plausible, afraid of nothing except of admitting the
truth. Not one in a million Gonerils will say
straight out : " I have the power and mean to use
it. I regard everyone of whom I can make no use
as a nuisance, and will get rid of him as I would of
the body of a dead dog." Goneril could not have
said that, even in the phrasing of a Shakespeare,
without feeling a good deal more of a devil than
she did feel and making herself unhappy. We can
always remain moderately happy so long as we are
able to keep up the pretence that we are doing
right. That is what we call having a good con-
science. Very few of us have the honesty or the
common sense to see that to have a good conscience

45

COWARD CONSCIENCE

when one is not doing good is merely to double
one's sin. It is far better to have no conscience at
all. We may be sure that the statesmen of Germany
have a perfectly good conscience in regard to
Belgium : that is the worst of them. A good con-
science is almost as easy to get as a bad reputation.
Nor have the Germans a monopoly of it. There
has always been a tremendous demand for it in
England, too, ever since Henry VIII. cleared his
conscience by abjuring the errors of Rome. Those
Englishmen who ordered native Indians to be tied
to the mouths of cannon and blown from them did
so, beyond a doubt, with a good conscience. Even
Bernhardi, who has a great name for callous
Machiavellianism, continually pauses to wag his
good conscience at us, and to explain what benefits
the forcible extension of German culture will bestow
upon the world at large. On the whole, the nation
or the man with a bad conscience is in the more
hopeful condition. A bad conscience is a conscience
that, however nervously, is facing the facts. Is
there a single nation in the world that has a bad
conscience at the present moment ? If there is, let it
hold up its hand ; it is the hope of the human race.

46

ON DOING NOTHING

Sometimes one looks forward to a holiday as a
period of entire laziness. One longs to do nothing
to lie in the sun on the edge of sleep to be no
more awake than is necessary to enable one to
enjoy the consciousness of one's nine-tenths slumber.
So one builds oneself a castle of indolence high
above the echoes of the working world. One is glad
above all to escape from the groaning and grunting of
wheeled things, which is the music of the modern
city. One desires to get away from that rasping,
lumbering activity of trousered mortals, which is so
unlike the careless activity of the angels, so far as
authorities instruct us on the matter. Eye, nose
and ear are, all of them, violated a thousand times a
day in the streets of the moneymakers. No flower
blooms from the walls of the Bank of England ; wild
roses do not grow in the Strand; larks do not
challenge the sky from the asphalt of Trafalgar
Square. Instead, one has the sound of wheels
and hooters, the smell of petrol and bars and tea-
shops and dog-shops and chemists and human
beings, the contact with men and women who are
less real to one than figures in a dream, the spectacle
of a multitude of hats and trousers and skirts, of
shop-fronts with ever so commonplace letters over
the window, of traffic discoloured and confused, of
policemen, of old men selling the Westminster
Gazette, of hearse and prison-van, of waste-paper
and dust-cart, of posters of revues that are mere
vulgar aphrodisiacs, of creatures-that-once-were-
men selling matches and bootlaces, of cats
crossing the road, of milkmen that make a noise

47

ON DOING NOTHING

like some obscene fowl. It is the most infernal
medley the world has ever seen. It is quite unlike
the medley of a fair, which is a holiday from the
month's quietness and which is after all for the
most part idleness and a game. A fair is the
concentration of a countryside, a gathering of the
farms. It is as full of animals as a menagerie, and
the men and women at it are as interesting as the
animals. Some people find in the day-long conflict
of town streets an even greater fascination. They
see in the town a permanent fair, with juggler
and clown and ballad-singer no longer in the
market-place but in the music hall, with shops
taking the place of booths, and with a thousand
concerns scarred and printed on the faces of those
who pass by such as the countryman never knows.
Even so, the fascination of town is a fascination
that exhausts. And the burden of money-making
is on too many shoulders, the noise of money-
making in too many ears. There is no leisure in
this quest. It is all a songless procession of men
and women who have forgotten the fields and have
not yet found the city of God.

One feels at times that one must escape from this
procession at all costs, and fly back into the country.
One feels (to change the image) that the harrows
of the day's work have broken one sufficiently, and
one would gladly lie fallow. And yet, when it
conies to the point, there is not one man in a
thousand who can acquire the perfect habit of
idleness. Some men are so bound to the interests
of townsmen that the holiday they prefer is a visit
to strange cities. They hasten through art galleries
and museums and churches and historic buildings
between meal and meal. They follow the beaten
track with enthusiasm, not for anything that it leads
them to, but simply because it is the beaten track.
They reckon up the spoils of the day by number

48

ON DOING NOTHING

and not for their beauty. Their greatest delight is
to be a part of the crowd, to share its excitement, its
movement, its flow of life. There are, I do not
deny, persons who make holiday in cities, not as
particles of a crowd, but as individuals. But these
are exceptions, and as a rule are persons of some
leisure who are not too closely penned in streets
during the working months of the year. Even
among those who choose the sea for a holiday there
are few who are content with mere indolence. In-
dolence to most of them means another hour in bed
in the morning, and no man giving them orders
during the day. If they were asked to be idler than
that they would yawn their heads off before the
evening of the first day. There must be a theatre,
where they can book seats for Daredevil Dorothy.
They would be unhappy without moving pictures,
and a pier with a band playing, and winter-gardens,
and tea-shops, and a dancing-hall. They eat a
five-course dinner while the sun is setting, and
while the twilight is changing the colours of the
world they play auction-bridge in the hotel drawing-
room. With them, too, a holiday consists principally
in exchanging one crowd for another in mixing
with a crowd that is spending money instead of
with a crowd that is earning it. I do not pretend
to be untouched myself by this love of crowds,
especially of crowds that are spending money, and
are, therefore, living not as they have to live, but
as they desire to live. But I would not choose their
company for a retreat into idleness.

As a matter of fact, true idleness is scarcely
possible for a rational being. One may try to
achieve it by lying in bed all day, but even if one
lies in bed till dinner-time one will be busying
oneself about the sights of the streets at midnight,
and exhibiting strange energy in cafe's and at coffee-
stalls. Stevenson preached idleness to a less driven

49 E

ON DOING NOTHING

world than ours, but he himself was not idle. On
the contrary, with his reading-book in one pocket
and his note-book in another, he now seems to us
a character almost worthy of the pen of Samuel
Smiles. The perfect idler would never be at the
pains to write his apology. The Stevensons and
the Thoreaus are merely humbugs when they pre-
tend to be more indolent than shopkeepers. Even
the laziest of us cannot go on a holiday without
waking into some kind of activity a hundred times
a day. We lie, sheltered from the wind, on a slope
of heather above the sea, oblivious of the world and
the world's war. A little boat appears below us
with two men in it hauling in a brown net over the
stern. We cannot help bestirring ourselves. We
cannot help watching for the bulge in the net and
the silver shape where a fish is entangled. We
count every leap in the net as it is gathered into
the boat. We take part in the energy of the fisher-
men. We notice that one of them is wearing boots
that are large and bright. We look again and see
he is a village policeman. The men land at a boat-
slip and haul their net on to the stone. They untie
a thousand knots with infinite patience, and after
each untying throw a fish to flap its tail on the
ground. Then the policeman carefully takes hold
of a long, lean, white-bellied dog-fish, and without
mercy dashes its head against a rock and flings it
back dead into the sea. A few knots later, he takes
out a sea-urchin like a little pink hedgehog and
holds it high up for us to look at. Our indolence
has been broken in upon. We cannot be indifferent
to such happenings. Next, we hear a chirrup like
a cricket's a few yards behind us. We look round
and see it is a bird fluttering from stone to stone.
We wonder what bird it is whether it is a stone-
chat. A long, bright green insect, a sort of beetle,
with gold spots on its wings, flies among the grass-

50

ON DOING NOTHING

blades near us, and again arouses our inquisitiveness.
We have not even the satisfaction of being able to
give a name, though it be a wrong name, to him
surely one of the lasting happinesses of life. We
call him vaguely a green beetle, but we know that
he will haunt us all our days until we are able to
pin a more definite noun upon him. Another beetle
passes along a footpath in the grass, mirroring
green and blue in its ugly body. Everwhere the
day is thronged with events. One cannot move a
step without coming upon some peeping orchis,
blue as a violet and tinier, or upon other larger
orchises with blossoms curiously marked so that
they seem to be standing about in cotton-print
frocks. And if one looks from one flower to another
one finds always a little an excitingly little change
in the pattern. Heather has begun to bloom, and
heath-bells ring on all sides as one walks, and the
bog-myrtle is fragrant as one's foot presses on it.
Scabious blue as the sea edges the cliff; the lesser
celandine and shepherd's purses sprinkle the world
with gold ; and yellow irises dance in the wind like
Wordsworth's daffodils. Everywhere the bog-cotton
rises with its three white plumes, sometimes nodding
like the plumes in a warrior's helmet, sometimes
waving like the pennons of a lance. It seems in
the wind like some fairy host advancing with
banners streaming. If one opens one's eyes at
all there is no escape from the miracle of the
flowers.

And one is continually compelled to open one's
eyes. No man on hearing a lark singing between
two hills can help looking up to see where it flutters
and dances on its wings. One gazes at it as the
heart of all music, the expression of the world's
happiness. Everywhere in field and farm one
sees animals doomed to die violent deaths the
servile brood of hens, sheep that move like a gang

ON DOING NOTHING

of slaves, geese with their necks stretched in a pre-
tence of valour, black cattle that graze on the distant
mountainside looking like little wooden figures
out of a Noah's Ark, young turkeys with humped
backs and plaintive cries, pigs that are jests in the
flesh from their grunting snouts to their curled
tails, calves that never smile even when they frisk
like dervishes. But over them all dances the lark
in the air, an optimist, a reconciler. And the
world is well worth a song. Down the side of the
mountain the sunlight flows like running water,
chased by a shadow. Below lies the sea, variable
in colours as a pigeon's neck repeating the crowded
sky. Everywhere are hills blue hills in the dis-
tance, purple hills after rain, scarred and shining
green hills near at hand, rosy hills in the last light
of the sun, brown hills in the twilight. Down from
the sides of them at night red foxes scatter poultry
fanciers. On the lonely beach a lonely seagull
stands. The village of white cottages on the
shoulder of the cliff huddles in the gathering dark-
ness like a flock of sleepy birds. There will be
no real darkness to-night, for a half-moon has
climbed above the hill, making the white house at
the bottom of the sloping field glimmer like a spirit.
Under its benediction one goes upstairs to sleep.
One is ready to sleep, for one has been exceedingly
busy all day . . . doing nothing.

RUTHLESSNESS

Germany seems to be the only country in Europe
at present in which the soldiers are as ferocious as
the journalists. Perhaps this is because in Germany
so many of the soldiers are journalists. So far
as one can gather from the descriptions of the
Christmas truce on the battlefield, the common
German soldier, is, like the soldier of other nations,
a human being who is much more inclined by
nature to friendliness than to hatred. But the
scribbling German soldier, or the scribbling Ger-
man sailor who is almost always a general or
an admiral is as excitably ferocious as anything
you could find in Fleet Street. He is about on
the level of the Nonconformist journalist who
recently spoke with withering scorn of those of his
fellow-Christians who still believed in praying for
their enemies. This is, one may admit, the ancient
logic of fighting. The pagan in each of us wishes
to give his enemies hell, not only in this world,
but in the next. When the tipsy Orangeman shouts
"To Hell with the Pope!" he probably expresses
with perfect accuracy his opinion of the punishment
which he thinks the Pope deserves ; and I have
heard a devout Catholic, at mention of Tom Paine,
say with grim satisfaction : " He's sizzling in Hell
now." If we can wish our enemies torture that
will last through eternity, it seems rather absurd
that we should be squeamish about causing them
such pain and misery as we can during the brief
interval of their habitation of the earth.

Our ancestors certainly did not shrink from the
logic of punishment as regards either this world

53

RUTHLESSNESS

or the next. The history of penal methods, whether
in England, France, Spain, or China, is a history
of ruthlessness which is at times so horrible as to
seem almost ludicrous. Ruthlessness, it was usually
assumed, was the only safe way of protecting
society against its enemies. Ruthlessness, the
Count von Reventlows seem to assume at the
present moment, is the only safe way of protecting
Germany against its enemies. It is not apparently
a matter of revenge so much as of policy. They
defend the burning of Louvain, the shooting of
hostages, the bombardment of undefended towns,
the torpedoing of merchant ships and sending of their
crews to the bottom, not as glorious acts of national
hatred, but as the only means of terrorising the
Allies into submission. One would imagine that,
if ruthlessness has been found. ineffective as a means
of suppressing badly armed and badly equipped
criminals, it must be found still more ineffective
as a means of suppressing well-armed and well-
equipped nations. And when the history of the
present war comes to be written, I shall be sur-
prised if even the German historians will not be
found admitting that every act of inhumanity of
which their army was guilty only resulted in adding
to the number and strength of their enemies.
There are Germans who point to the comparative
peace and quiet which at present reign in Belgium
as a proof of the wisdom of German policy. But
no one will deny that a people may for a time be
intimidated into silence by ruthlessness. What I
do deny is that Germany is a step nearer victory as
a result of her ruthlessness. The ruthlessness of
Germany, we may be sure, did much to strengthen
King Albert and his government in their determi-
nation to hold out to the last minute in Antwerp
and to allow neither themselves nor their stores,
neither their docks nor their shipping, to fall into

54

RUTHLESSNESS

the hands of pitiless enemies. Germany, indeed,
by her conduct in Belgium raised not only Belgium,
but half the world, against her. There are thousands
of Englishmen, Scotsmen, and Irishmen now being
trained to fight against Germany who would still
be sitting at home reading the newspapers if Ger-
many had not forced herself on their imaginations
as a big bully torturing a people smaller than
herself.

Whether bullying ever pays or not is a question
which it is not easy to answer. Clearly, there has
always been a great deal of bullying in the relations
between strong and weak peoples, as there has been
in the relations between strong and weak men. The
big Empire has not won its way to its present
position by what is called brotherly love any more
than the big landlord or the big manufacturer has.
On the other hand, there is all the difference in the
world between bullying within limits and bullying
without mercy. The Roman Republic bullied its
provinces without mercy; the Roman Empire by
comparison bullied them within limits. The merci-
less sort of bully ing has usually been done either in the
name of religion or in the name of culture. Nearly
all the great acts of mercilessness which stain the
pages of history were interpreted in terms of some
lofty purpose like that with which the German apolo-
gists justify their creed of ruthlessness to-day. Alva
felt no pangs of remorse for his cruelties in the
Low Countries. On the contrary, he boasted that,
apart from all the thousands he had slain in battle
and massacred afterwards, he had delivered over
18,000 people to the executioner. Almost certainly,
at the time, he had no doubt that he was establish-
ing Spanish and Catholic culture in the Low
Countries for ever. But what remains of Spain
and her conquering hosts in those parts now ?
Nothing but a memory and a reviling. It would

55

RUTHLESSNESS

be straining language a little, however, to describe
Alva's " Court of Blood " as a crime of culture. We
find a much better example of the ruthlessness of
culture in the scarcely less famous massacre of
Glencoe. Here was a crime plotted by a statesman
as civilized as the most civilized of Germans. The
Master of Stair, as Macaulay says, was " one of the
first men of his time, a jurist, a statesman, a fine
scholar, an eloquent orator." He was good-natured,
not disposed to cruelty, had " no personal reason
to wish the Glencoe men any ill," and " there is
not the slightest reason to believe that he gained
a single pound Scots by the act which has covered
his name with infamy." His aim in planning the most
treacherous of crimes was neither personal greed nor
personal glory. " His object," continues the historian,
" was no less than a complete dissolution and re-
construction of society in the Highlands. . . .
This explanation may startle those who have not
considered how large a proportion of the blackest
crimes recorded in history is to be ascribed to ill-
regulated public spirit. We daily see men do for
their party, for their sect, for their country, for
their favourite schemes of political and social
reform, what they would not do to enrich or to
avenge themselves. At a temptation directly ad-
dressed to our private cupidity or to our private
animosity, whatever virtue we have takes alarm.
But virtue itself may contribute to the fall of him
who imagines that it is in his power, by violating
some general rule of morality, to confer an
important benefit on a church, or a common-
wealth, or mankind. He silences the remons-
trances of conscience, and hardens his heart
against the most touching spectacles of misery,
by repeating to himself that his intentions are
pure, that his objects are noble, that he is doing
a little evil for the sake of a great good."

56

RUTHLESSNESS

Public spirit, therefore, is not only one of the most
splendid virtues ; it may also be one of the most
dangerous vices. It is a vice on the part of every
man who does not realize that it is as easy to disgrace
one's country or one's party as it is to disgrace
oneself by certain forms of wickedness. The
German theory of the State, however, is that it is
something which, like the superman, is beyond good
and evil. From this point of view, the State can do
no wrong. It is capable of but one virtue power ;
and of one sin feebleness. Those who admit
this theory of the State obviously need not be dis-
turbed even if one accuses them, in their public
capacity, of all the crimes in the Newgate Calendar.
As a matter of fact the Germans are seriously dis-
turbed by some of the accusations that have been
made against them. One day they preach ruthless-
ness, and the next day they spend in proving that
they have not been ruthless at all. They are scarcely
more bent upon defying the laws of war than upon
proving that they have all along scrupulously
observed the laws of war. The truth is, their
theory of the State is the invention of their heads,
not of their consciences, and they find themselves
compelled to salute virtue even as they advocate new
crimes.

One of the most interesting examples of a govern-
ment's refusing to adopt a policy of ruthlessness has
been resuscitated lately in more than one quarter.
This was the refusal of the British Govern-
ment during the Napoleonic Wars to adopt Lord
Cochrane's " secret war plan " for the total destruc-
tion of the enemy's fleet. The Government Com-
mittee which considered the plan reported that it
was effective, but recommended its rejection on the
ground that it was inhuman. At the time of the
Crimean War, Cochrane or, as he then was, Dun-
donald revived his proposals, but again they were

57

RUTHLESSNESS

rejected. One wonders what they were. Were they
really an anticipation of poison gas ? One would
like to know what were the limits thus officially set
to the ruthlessness of war. Certainly England has
never been in want of advocates of ruthlessness.
Mr. Norman Angell with whom one may agree or
disagree on general grounds quotes several apt
examples from British military writers in his book,
Prussianism and its Destruction. Thus Major Stewart
Murray, in The Future Peace of the Anglo-Saxons,
which won the praise of Lord Roberts, derides " the
sanctity of international law " as fiercely as any
Prussian could, and inveighs against " sickening
humanitarianism." Dr. Miller Maguire, again, is
quoted as having written in the Times during the
Boer War : " The proper strategy consists in the
first place in inflicting as terrible blows as possible
upon the enemy's army, and then in causing the in-
habitants so much suffering that they must long
for peace and force their Government to demand it.
The people must be left with nothing but their eyes to
weep with over the war." This last phrase, which I
believe is taken from Tilly, has been quoted several
times during the present war as Bismarck's, and has
been condemned in accents of horror as an example
of the atrocious Prussian theory of war. One knows
very well that when Dr. Miller Maguire used it he
did not mean to justify the horrors of Belgium or a
slaughter of unarmed men and women at Scar-
borough and Whitby. But if we admit that his
sentiment is just, how can we logically protest
against these outrages ? What are the limits of
ruthlessness ? Where are we to draw the line ? It
seems to me that the line is a rather vague one. I
hold, however, that in waging war every nation must
make up its mind to choose between the policy of
" the less ruthlessness the better " and " the more
ruthlessness the better"; and that deliberately to

58

RUTHLESSNESS

choose the latter is a crime against the human race.
Spain of the Inquisition, Turkey of the Armenian
atrocities these are supreme examples of ruthless-
ness, and they are clear enough proof that ruthless-
ness does not necessarily lead to national greatness.
England in Elizabethan and Georgian Ireland is
another instance of ruthlessness, and has not English
policy in Ireland been her crowning failure ? Ruth-
lessness, no doubt, has its victories no less renowned
than mercy. But, on the whole, the history of
ruthlessness is not a history of triumph, but a history
of imbecility.

Credulous rationalists used to believe that myths
were largely the invention of priests. That belief has
been slain by the anthropologists, who perceive
that myths have grown up everywhere not as delib-
erate impostures, but as the curly-headed children
of good faith. Even the anthropoligists, however,
are inclined to regard them as the perversities of
people very unlike and inferior to ourselves, called
savages. One writer on the subject speaks of " the
very peculiar mental condition of the lower races,"
and quotes Max Miiller's question in regard to the
primitive ages during which myths are invented :
" Was there a period of temporary madness through
which the human mind had to pass, and was it a
madness identically the same in the south of India
and the north of Iceland ? " We need only reflect
for a moment on the myths already produced by the
European war to corne to the conclusion either that
the savage is not so mad as he looks or that we also
are more than a little mad. Surely, it was out of
" a very peculiar mental condition " that the myth
of the 30,000 or 70,000 or 250,000 Russians who
passed through England on their way to Belgium
and France was born. And we may say the same
of the myth of the Belgian children with their hands
and feet cut off by Prussian soldiers, the myth of
Lord Haldane's treachery, and half a dozen other
myths of the moment, which are passionately believed
in tens of thousands of British households. We
know that in pious German homes myths of the
same kind have taken the place of Grimm's Fairy
Tales. I have no doubt that in France, in Russia, in

60

MYTHS

Serbia, in Hungary and in Japan the war is produc-
ing an equally remarkable folklore. Now this is not
the work of priests or of people whom missionaries
would describe as savages. It is not even except
in the case of the Haldane myth the work of news-
papers. It is for the most part simply the work of
the popular imagination, which, far more fiercely
than Nature, abhors a vacuum. Ever since the
world began, the popular imagination has been busily
pouring into one vacuum after another all manner of
beautiful and terrible and absurd things. It works
with the dreadful persistence of an insect giving its
bowels to its task. It will not rest until it has filled
the throne of the universe and replenished with
strange details the lives of great men and has made
every hollow in our knowledge of places and people
and things a little hilly hive of buzzing and tumul-
tuous fancies. It does not love untruth more than
truth, but neither does it love truth more than un-
truth. It makes use of every shade of both, as an
artist uses his paints. Its aim is to convert life into
a series of thrills, pictures, decorations and dramas
instead of a mere formulated confession of ignorance.
It is no more willing to say, " I don't know," than
the traditional Irish peasant of whom you inquire
the distance to some place or other about which he
knows as little as he knows about Constantinople.
Far from being agnostic, it is positive, creative even
riotously so. It does not scribble " Why ? " all over
the heavens and the earth as the men of science do.
Rather, it populates the waters of the earth with
sea-serpents, and the woods with dancing fairies, and
the solitary house with its ghost, and the sky with
the anger of God when it thunders and with the
gentleness of God when the rainbow shines. Devils,
goblins, griffins, unicorns, the sweet music of sirens,
men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders,
gods who married the daughters of men, scandal

61

MYTHS

about Queen Elizabeth, giants, salamanders here
are things of a more enticing and haunting interest
than any imbecile "why." Here is not emptiness,
but abundance abundance more wonderful and
coloured than the abundance of a fruiterer's shop.
Is it any wonder that few except the dull and the
wise can resist the invitation to come and buy ?

There is this difference to be noted, however,
between the civilized man and the savage in regard
to their myths. The civilized man is ever so much
more eager than the savage to support his myths
with evidence as if he were in a court of law. The
savage is content to invent his myth : the civilized
man is not happy until he has invented his evidence
too. There was never a myth supported with such
a mass of absolutely convincing evidence as the
myth of the Russian troops in England. It was
rare to meet a man in the street who had not a
relative in some railway department concerned with
passing the troops through, or who had not spoken
to an engine-driver who had driven one of the trains
that carried them from Aberdeen to Bristol, or whose
most intimate friend had not taken a leading part in
sending the transports to Archangel, or whose
intimate general or colonel (whom Lord Kitchener
could not possibly have any object in deceiving) had
not confided to him the exact number of Russians on
their way, or who had not seen them with his own
eyes late at night in a little country station wearing
huge beards and speaking a wild language which
was neither French nor Yiddish, or whose friend in
the Territorials, having promised to sign his name
with two " t's " instead of one if on arriving in
France he found the Russians there, had doubled
the " t " on his first postcard home, or but one
need not continue. One heard so many of these
stories that one almost believed one had seen the
Russians oneself. It is the same with the myth of

62

MYTHS

the Belgian mutilations. It was impossible to meet
anyone who did not know somebody or at the very
least who did not know somebody who knew some-
body who had seen the child with his or her own
eyes. Every suburb of London, every town, every
village, almost every vicarage, had its Belgian child
sans hands, sans feet. One knew people who knew
people who could vouch for it on the very best
authority. The mutilated children had been sent in
trainloads to Paris and in boatloads to England.
To doubt a man's Belgian child soon became as
serious a matter as to doubt his God. There are, I
am sure, hundreds of men, and thousands of women,
who would be willing to shed their blood for their
faith in that Belgian child. At a recent meeting,
where a well-known surgeon confessed his disbelief
in such things, several of those present on the plat-
form rose up and left the hall. To show anything
except a blind unquestioning faith in the Belgian
child was to be a pro-German of the most evil-minded
sort.

Now the real sufferings of Belgium it would be
almost impossible to exaggerate, and the story of
those sufferings is an infinitely longer and more
horrible story than the most long-winded or Sadistic
version of the mutilated Belgian child. But
apparently the public had to get into its mind some
dramatic representation of all that horror, some re-
presentation which would be an easy and stimulating
substitute for the prolonged study of a hundred
thousand scattered facts. The ubiquitous Belgian
child gave the public what it wanted one of those
favourite symbols in wartime when men like to
picture themselves as the knights of God fighting
against devils more atrocious than the Devil. But
what puzzles one in the whole business is the way
in which evidence in support of things which have
not happened is invented among perfectly honest

63

MYTHS

people. It is partly due to the fact that the majority
even of honest people modify the nature of the
evidence as they pass it on. One man passes some-
thing on to a friend as a piece of hearsay; the
second relates it as something which a friend of his
actually witnessed ; the next man to hear the story
makes it still more dramatic by declaring that he
saw the thing himself. And even the third of these
men may be, comparatively speaking, honest. He
is frequently one of those persons subject to
hallucinations who believe they have been present at
what they have merely heard about, just as George
IV. firmly believed that he had fought at the battle
of Waterloo.

In private life we are, as a rule, somewhat
impatient of the hallucinated man. We find it
simplest to call him a liar and leave it at that. It
would be a most convenient arrangement if human
beings could be divided into those who are liars and
those who are not, but such a -division would be a
classification for the sake of classification and would
have small basis in reality. Whether we are liars
or not depends largely on what we are talking about.
When we are talking about something that excites
us, we are more likely to invent than when we are
talking about something which we can approach
calmly. When a reader of the Jingo Press, for
instance, is talking about alien enemies he finds it
quite easy to invent the legend that the man with
the German name who lives in the next street walks
up and down his roof all night waving a red lantern
to show the German airmen where to drop bombs.
When not one person but a million persons simulta-
neously invent a legend of this sort all over a country
you soon get a myth which the ordinary man believes
a good deal more fervently than he believes the
miracles of the New Testament. The story of the
German governess in whose rooms the bombs were

64

MYTHS

found, which went the rounds in England in the
early days of the war, is an excellent example of
this kind of collective invention or hallucination. As
for the Lord Haldane myth, it is of the same order,
though it is fortunately not quite so popular, being in-
deed what may be called a mere party myth. Still, the
Lord Haldane who appears in it is a figure of the
genuinely mythical order. One can imagine that in
less prosaic days he would have appeared villainously
in the forefront of many a popular ballad :

" Childe Haldane stood at the War Office door,
Stroking his milk-white steed."

How many seemingly intelligent people there are
who can even give you a detailed account of Childe
Haldane's wickednesses ! Only the other day a man
a voter, a taxpayer, and, possibly, a father declared
that he had personal knowledge of the fact that just
before the war broke out Lord Haldane had written
a private letter to all the officers in command of the
different English naval ports telling them to cross
over to Germany where they would have, of course,
been interned. The myth-maker does not trouble
to enquire even whether Lord Haldane is at the
War Office or at the Admiralty or at neither. All
he wants is a good whacking myth and before long
his sleep becomes full of pleasant dreams of Lord
Haldane's head on a pole as one of the new attrac-
tions of the Tower. Lord Haldane is only one of a
score of people, indeed, whom the more unbalanced
section of the public has condemned to the Tower
since the present war began. He may be amused to
recall that in the course of an anti-German agitation
sixty years ago the public with equally acute im-
aginativeness committed Queen Victoria and Prince
Albert to the same prison. In a letter from Windsor
Castle on January 24th, 1854, Prince Albert wrote :

65 F

MYTHS

" You will scarcely credit that my being committed
to the Tower was believed all over the country, nay,
even that the Queen had been arrested ! People
surrounded the Tower in thousands to see us
brought to it ! Victoria has taken the whole affair
greatly to heart, and was excessively indignant at
the attacks."

But it is very little use being indignant with a myth.
Indignation has as little effect on a myth as on a
bad egg.

I began by suggesting that myths were attempts on
the part of the popular imagination to fill some vacuum
or other. Surely the reason why the myths of the
present war have been so much more on the grand
scale and so much longer-lived than has been the
rule in recent wars is that the conditions of Press
censorship leave us with a world as void of news as
any primitive jungle. We have not had news com-
mensurate with the grandeur of the business on
which the world is engaged and so we have had to
invent the story of the war which our accredited
representatives, the newspaper correspondents, are
not allowed to see. It is as if the Press Censor had
surrounded the area of the war with a high wall of
paper on which no hand had written and had said
to us : " Let each man write on it what he will."
That is why we have been so strenously scribbling
all over those immense blank spaces like a child left
alone with a lead pencil in a white-walled room.
There we have written our epics of ghostly armies
and inscribed our ballads of mutilated children and
published to the world the story of the life and
death of many a noble traitor. It will be interest-
ing to see, when the war is over, how many of these
scrawlings of the human imagination will survive.
Even with a censored Press, it seems to me, the
myth has little chance of survival as soon as it gets

66

MYTHS

into the papers. Already the visionary army has
melted into air into thin air. The Belgian child is
slowly melting. Even Lord Haldane is melting.
The myths of savages grow with a certain gigantic
slowness and they enjoy long lives like forest trees
and tortoises, but the myths of civilised man last no
longer than garden flowers, or grass, or cheese, or
the daily paper.

67

ON COURAGE

There is nothing which has been proved more
clearly by the present war, if indeed it needed proving,
than that civilization does not make for the decline
of courage. The stories which are being brought in
from the battlefields contain a superfluity of evidence
that man is fighting as bravely in the twentieth
century as he fought on the windy plain of Troy
or at Marathon near the sea. It has often been the
custom to regard courage as a peculiarly pagan
virtue, easily undermined by Christianity, culture,
and civilization. The Goths, when they overran
Greece, deliberately abstained from setting fire to
the libraries owing to the fact that I quote Florio's
Montaigne " one among them scattered this opinion,
that such trash of books and papers must be left
untoucht and whole for their enemies as the only
meane and proper instrument to divert them from
all militarie exercises, and ammuse them to idle,
secure, and sedentarie occupations." We know
better than this now, and soldiers no longer defeat
their enemies by leaving them their libraries. They
do not even burn their own. The Germans are,
compared to any other European army, an army of
bookworms ; yet the record of their bloody race
across France is, in sheer warlike boldness, as
amazing as anything in history.

It is the custom of most peoples to abuse their
enemies and, especially in war time, to sneer at them
as a mob of cowards. I heard a lady at a recruiting
meeting the other day assuring her hearers in the
traditional manner that the Germans were cowards
to a man. It is a poor compliment to the armies of

68

ON COURAGE

the Allies to suggest that a host of cowards was able
to bear them back so long and so far. But the taunt
is hardly worth mentioning except in so far as it re-
minds one that to denounce a man or a nation for
cowardice is almost universally regarded as the
supreme insult you can offer. Certainly one would
rather be almost anything than a coward. Most
people, I fancy, would prefer to be liars or wife-
beaters or plunderers of the poor. One of the earliest
fears of every boy who is not born, like Nelson, with
the genius of fearlessness is that he may deserve the
reproach of looking afraid. " Fear ! grandmama "
so, the schoolboy learns, Nelson spoke as a child
" I never saw fear. What is it ?" One learns in
later life of Nelson's vanity, his treachery, his narrow
and tyrannical ignorance in public affairs ; but one
never loses that first enthusiasm for his deathless
courage. One finds a new hero in Mucius Scaevola
as soon as one begins to learn Roman history.
Rousseau tells us that, when as a boy he heard the
story of Mucius Scaevola for the first time at table,
his family " were terrified at seeing me start from
my seat and hold my hand over a hot chafing-dish,
to represent more forcibly the action of that deter-
mined Roman." I, too, long before I had ever
heard the name of Rousseau, was eager to thrust
my right hand into the blaze and so add another to
the line of the heroes. A certain realism, however,
always finally prevented me from putting myself too
closely to the test, and the swift passage of a finger
through the gas-flame was the nearest I ever got to
Roman virtue. That one should feel like this at all,
however, is suggestive of the instinct that is in all of
us continually to challenge our bravery. In time of
war many men enlist simply because they cannot
endure any longer to leave that challenge unanswered.
Goethe, we are told, no sooner felt afraid to do a
thing than he did it. If he felt timid of climbing to

69

ON COURAGE

the top of a high tower he immediately climbed up
and became master of himself. Some men have the
good fortune to be born with this mastery, but they
must be comparatively few. A famous general
was it Havelock ? said that in every regiment there
were ten per cent, heroes, ten per cent, cowards,
and eighty per cent, men who were a mixture of
hero and coward. There is more of David Balfour
than of Alan Breck in most of us. We hesitate
before we jump, and we earn our courage in the sweat
of our brows. We have long since given up the
aspiration to be Nelsons. We sympathize far more
intimately with the ancient soldier who, on finding
his limbs begin to shake as he went into battle,
addressed them with grim humour : " You would
tremble much worse than that, my friends, if you
knew what I am going to put you through be-
fore I am done with you;" and with the other
soldier who, on being jeered at for his pallor and
nervousness, replied to his tormentor : " If you were
half as afraid as I am, you would have run away."

That, as a rule, is the courage not of men trained
to danger, but of beginners. I have heard an artist
who accompanied the Japanese troops in the Russo-
Japanese war say that, on his first going under fire,
he was so frightened that he bit through the mouth-
piece of his pipe. He was regarded, he added, as a
highly comic figure by the Japanese on account of
his fears. It would obviously be impossible for
soldiers to go on suffering from nervousness like this.
They soon get hardened to the peril of war : it is
not long before they cease to duck at the passage of
bullets. A sergeant in the Royal Engineers described
the other day how the British troops rushed into
battle at one point singing and shouting : " Early
doors this way ; early doors, gd." That is an illus-
tration of the contempt for danger that soldiers, if
they are well led, learn. One finds a still more ex-

70

ON COURAGE

cellent example of the contempt for danger in a story
in the Daily Telegraph about the crew of an English
submarine which was fired at by the Germans while
she was scouting :

" As she came to the surface her conning-tower
was fired at. She submerged herself, and rested on
the bottom. After four hours, the atmosphere having
become somewhat thick, she came up for air.

" Her conning-tower was again a mark for the
enemy, and one shot went through. Hastily
plugging the hole, she was again submerged,
waiting at the bottom until it was dark, when she
came up and escaped.

"The young officer in command, in making his
report, was asked what they did while on the mud.
' I did fine,' he replied ; ' we played auction bridge
all the time, and I made 45. nid.' "

There you have courage as in the legends, as
thrilling in its own way as that of Scsevola. We
may laugh at such schoolboy's courage, peacock
courage, but how magnificently enviable !

So magnificent and enviable a gift is courage that
it seems at times to be the indispensable virtue.
Courage is the sword and the staff of virtue;
without it virtue goes about unarmed. On the
other hand, to bow down and worship courage, as
we are sometimes inclined to do, is mere idolatery.
It is almost as great a mistake, though not so foolish,
as to sneer at courage as want of imagination.
Courage, like a fine sword, may be in a noble or an
ignoble hand. There was a leading article in a
London newspaper the other day which asserted
that courage could only be shown in a just cause,
and that the difference between courage and ferocity
might be seen in the comparison between the con-
duct of the Allies and of the Germans in the present

71

ON COURAGE

war. This is nonsense and confusion. The charge
of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War, which
had certainly little to do with justice, was as memor-
able an act of courage as the stand of Leonidas and
his men in the pass of Thermopylae. Alcibiades,
the exquisite traitor, was as famous for his courage
as Garibaldi. Coriolanus made war against his city
with as marvellous a heroism as he had shown in
its behalf. Courage has been shown on the scaffold
by murderers no less than by martyrs. Mr. Shaw
once shocked the readers of a paper called V.C. by
contributing to a symposium on " The Bravest Deed
I Ever Knew " the opinion that Czogolz, who had
just assassinated President McKinley, had shown the
qualities that go to the winning of the Victoria Cross
in a more conspicuous manner than anyone else he
could think of. Indifference to death, the courage
to face the fury of a mob alone, absolute self-sacrifice
one dismisses these as callousness in a fearless man
of whose action one does not approve. One might
as well, however, deny beauty to a woman whose
morals one dislikes as courage to a man whose
morals one dislikes. Every woman is the better for
being beautiful, and every man is the better for
being brave. But there are other gifts of wisdom,
affection, and truthfulness, without which beauty
and courage are the mere graces of animals. Wise
courage, which at times seems to partake of timidity,
is a far rarer thing than rash courage. This is the
courage of the great statesman and the great soldier.
It is the courage which often avoids the battle, the
courage which knows how to retreat. Pericles had
this kind of courage. " In his military conduct,"
says Plutarch, " he gained a great reputation for
wariness ; he would not by his good-will engage in
any fight which had much uncertainty or hazard ;
he did not envy the glory of generals whose rash
adventures fortune favoured with brilliant success

7 2

ON COURAGE

however they were admired by others ; nor did he
think them worthy his imitation, but always used
to say to his citizens that, so far as lay in his
power, they should continue immortal, and live for
ever." The most courageous action in his career,
perhaps, was his refusal to go out and fight the
Spartans when they invaded and pillaged the Athenian
territory, and pitched their camp challengingly out-
side the city. " Many made songs and lampoons
upon him," we are told, " which were sung about
the town to his disgrace, reproaching him with the
cowardly exercise of his office of general, and the
tame abandonment of everything to the enemy's
hands."

The history of war is a record of heroic re-
treats no less than of heroic charges. We have
seen lately in the retreat of Joffre and French a
wonderful feat of heroism of this order. For ten
generals who have the courage to advance there is
hardly one who has the courage or the cleverness to
run away.

73

THRICE IS HE ARMED . . .

I doubt if there is any belief more indestructible
than the belief in the ultimate triumph of justice.
It requires a cold-blooded philosopher to question it.
The world has seen Poland dismembered, Socrates
compelled to drink poison, and St. Peter crucified
upside down. But these things are Devil's triumphs
of a moment. Poland still lives as a faith, and
Socrates as an example, and St. Peter survives in the
stones of churches over five continents. While in-
justice seems to reign, we may believe that justice is
in the tomb, but we also believe that it awaits a
glorious resurrection. No Irishman has ever been
finally disheartened by the fact that his country has
been in subjection for seven hundred years ; he would
believe in inevitable victory even though it were to
remain subject for yet another seven centuries. This
faith in a different scheme of things from the scheme
which is mapped in Whitaker's Almanack is a world-
wide phenomenon. Each of us, in so far as we do
not live for self-interest, is a predestinate soldier in
ghostly legions : we march towards the morrow
under banners announcing that justice we must have
though the heavens fall. It is as though we claimed
citizenship in two worlds at once the visible world
of the seven sins and the invisible world of the one
righteousness which men variously call love, and
truth, and justice. Not only this, but it is our
instinct continually to call in the invisible world to
redress the balance of the visible. We tell ourselves
that the just man has fighting on his side unseen
companies the apostolic cloud of witnesses. We
endow him in our imaginations with miraculous

74

THRICE IS HE ARMED . . .

gifts, like the old Greek heroes to whom gods lent
their aid in battle. We interpret the Biblical cry of
triumph, " By the help of my God I have leaped
over a wall," as the shout of a just man who has
performed a wonder. Not we, perhaps, but at least
our ancestors once did. And the prophecy that
" one man shall chase a thousand " must have
brought rejoicing to generations of Puritans, each of
whom saw himself as the just man in pursuit of a
multitude of naughty neighbours. The Christian
imagination is tamer than the Hebrew, but it, too,
trebles and decuples the powers of the righteous
man. "Thrice is he armed who hath his quarrel
just " has passed into a proverb ; and has not a quite
modern poet sung :

" My strength is as the strength of ten
Because my heart is pure ? "

We may well inquire what basis there is in fact for
this heavenly arithmetic.

Napoleon did not quite believe in it. He even
accused God of always being on the side of the big
battalions. Wellington, too, said that he had heard
people talk about a good general being able to defeat
an enemy many times more numerous than himself,
but that he had never seen it done. In 1870 the
Germans defeated the French by consistently out-
numbering them on the day of battle. They were
187,000 to 113,000 at Gravelotte; 155,000 to 90,000
at Sedan. "Therefore," says Captain H. M. John-
stone, discussing these facts in a recent book, The
Foundations of Strategy, " it is the duty of Govern-
ments to enable their generals to meet 100,000 with
200,000, if this be in any way possible ; and thereafter
of the general to do his best to surprise the 100,000.
For war is no idle game, and this branch of the
etiquette of sport does not apply." Certainly, neither
the courage nor the just cause of the three hundred

75

THRICE IS HE ARMED . . .

at Thermopylae helped them a whit more than did
the ritualistic combing of their long hair when the
Persian hordes came upon them, flogged into battle
by their captains with long whips. If the Greeks
had better fortune at Marathon, has not a German
professor explained this by estimating that the army
of Darius, instead of numbering 5,100,000, as Hero-
dotus believed, did not contain more than 15,000
warriors, or a great deal fewer than the conquering
Greeks ? The same authority refuses to believe that
William the Conqueror landed in England with a
smaller force than Harold could bring against him.
Harold, he estimates, had an army of about 4,000
instead of the 400,000 or 1,200,000 which have been
freely attributed to him ; and to meet this William
was able to bring 6,000 or 7,000 men many times
fewer, by the way, than the old estimate of 32,000 or
60,000. Even if we admit the exceeding importance
of numbers, however, the fact remains that they are
not the final secret in warfare. " In war," said
Napoleon, the prophet of the big battalions, " the
moral is to the physical as three to one " ; and,
though the moral includes discipline and all manner
of things, one cannot overlook the importance of the
soldiers' belief in the justice of their cause. We are
constantly told that the good soldier has no politics,
and, as regards party politics, this is true enough.
At the same time, soldiers, like other people, must
have their opinions on the causes of wars, and they
will not enter with the same heart into a war which
they believe to be unjust as into a just war. In the
present war we see each side taking infinite pains to
convince itself of the justice of the cause for which
it is fighting.

Each of the nations engaged makes desperate
attempts to manoeuvre its opponents into a position
of manifest injustice. Mr. Lloyd George arraigns
Germany and Austria as raiders of the little nations.

THRICE IS HE ARMED . . .

The Germans denounce England as the engineers
of a wicked plot to overwhelm German culture with
the aid of European and Asiatic barbarism. Each
country proclaims loudly that it is carrying on a war
in defence of the rights of the weak against the
strong. Each regards the case for the war put for-
ward by the other side as lying and hypocritical.
Call it hypocrisy or not, it springs from an old
instinct which tells us that we must have justice on
our side or we shall perish. Even Bernhardi,
though he denies the existence of justice as between
State and State, commends his creed of war to the
moralist by the plea that all things are just in the
furtherance of the interests of one's own State. It
is a heathen doctrine. It is the transformation of
the old tribal god into a new tribal ethic. According
to this theory, every war is a just war in which you
are victorious. The saying " My country, right or
wrong," loses its meaning, for by hypothesis one's
country is always right. One speculates as to the
bewilderment a man like Bernhardi must feel when
he reads how Chatham rejoiced to hear of the
defeat of his countrymen in the American War. I
may admit in confidence that I am sometimes
puzzled what to think about it myself. For a man
to be so eager for the triumph of justice that he
would willingly see his country defeated to bring it
about is a height of virtue which is almost inhuman.
And yet men will sacrifice themselves and their
children for justice, and no one will be surprised.
Why, then, should we be astonished if a great man
desires to see his country fall in the cause of a juster
world ?

The truth is, most of us are of two minds. We
vacillate helplessly between the supreme claims of
justice and the claims of our country, and, when
they conflict, we are almost always of the Bernhardi
party and take sides with the State. We say that

77

THRICE IS HE ARMED . . .

right is might, but we do not believe it to the point
of being willing to face an army almost single-
handed, like Horatius Codes, in the assurance of
the justice of our cause. Yet every martyr believes
this. He does not believe that right will necessarily
bring him any personal victory ; but he realizes that
defeat in a just cause may often mean victory for
the cause. It was so with John Brown. John
Brown never fought half so well for the slaves as
John Brown's body did. It is with spiritual, not
with physical, power that the just man is thrice
armed ; but the spiritual has a way of drawing the
physical after it, as in the case of Joan of Arc.
There you have the case of a nervous girl in her
teens leading strong men to do what no general of
her time could make them do. She was worth to
them more than a thousand thousand spears. She
held up before them the divine justice of their cause
as miraculously attractive as the brazen serpent.
That is the difference between courage in a just
cause and courage that has no righteous passion at
the back of it. This we may admire ; that we must
emulate. There has seldom been more desperate
courage shown than by the so-called anarchists of
Sydney Street ; but they do not raise up new genera-
tions of men to follow them to their graves. They
have their appeal, no doubt, and the hushed readers
of penny dreadfuls will always have a warm corner
in their hearts for them. But it is only the courage
of just men that raises up heirs to itself. Washington
may have personally been no more fearless than
Jack the Ripper, but the courage of Washington
made a nation, while the courage of Jack the Ripper
was turned into ineffectual vileness. We may be
sure that Muggleton, the mad tailor who went booz-
ing round the publichouses in the time of Charles
II. and threatening damnation against all who
refused to believe that the sun was four miles from

78

THRICE IS HE ARMED . . .

the earth and that God was six feet high, was as
ready to die for his faith as any of the Protestant
martyrs of Smithfield. But it is no use being brave
for foolishness. Bravery like this is as barren as a
mule. We cannot but admire the heroes of fana-
ticism, but is only when their fanaticism is likened
to some kind of righteousness that it makes any
practical impression on us. Thus it is righteousness,
justice, rather than courage, which finally appeals to
us. It is justice more even than courage that is the
soldier's grand ally. With courage, he may perish ;
but with justice his cause cannot perish. " Thou
hast left behind," exclaimed Wordsworth, addressing
Toussaint 1'Ouverture,

" Powers that will work for thee, air, earth and

skies.

There's not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee ; thou hast great allies, j
Thy friends are exaltations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind."

That is the most we can say of any just man. We
know that he will help to bring back the world's
great age, but we know that, however just he may
be, his banners may fall a thousand times in battle
before the golden years return. Faith in the justice
of his cause, however, will make him rise and go on
fighting again as he could fight neither for glory nor
for his stomach's sake. " Travaillez, travaillez ! et
Dieu travaillera ! " was a saying that Joan of Arc
loved. It expresses the unyielding faith of the
soldiers in just causes in all ages.

79

THIS LUXURIOUS EARTH

There is a fruit-shop in Piccadilly in the window
of which little baskets of strawberries invite you to
buy them for twelve-and-sixpence. If you count the
strawberries, you will find there are about twenty-one
in a twelve-and-sixpenny basket. Strawberries, in
other words, after the death duties, after the land
tax, after the super-tax, after the doubling of the
income-tax, and during the greatest and costliest
war in history, are being sold in London at between
sevenpence and eightpence apiece. It seems an
amazing thing, quite apart from the circumstances
of the moment, that anyone should be willing to pay
sevenpence not to say eightpence for a strawberry.
Is the strawberry of April so much more fragrant
than the strawberry of June ? I doubt it. It is not
the charm of savour, it is the luxurious charm of
rarity, which makes people ready to pay the price of
a poor man's dinner for an April strawberry. It
seems to be in our natures to love what is rare more
than what is beautiful. We like things because
other people do not possess them. Who would be
fascinated by diamonds if the cliffs were made of
them ? It is not the eye of the artist but the eye of
the merchant which distinguishes the true diamond
from the false. Let us only believe a thing is rare,
and we take its beauty for granted. Publishers play
upon this weakness when they issue costly books in
editions consisting of a few score copies and pledge
themselves to distribute the type immediately after-
wards, so that the precious volumes can never become
everybody's possession. It seems almost a sin against
society to limit the production of beautiful things in

80

THE LUXURIOUS EARTH

this way. On the other hand, if everybody could
buy them, nobody might buy them ; and it is better
to have beautiful books published in small numbers
than not at all. Nor is the passion for what is rare
an entirely vulgar passion. It preys upon artists as
well as upon the bosoms of the rich. Rare things,
strange things, precious things have a sensational
importance which appeals to such born lovers of
sensations. Great artists fight their way through
this passion for sensations to the more austere passion
for truth ; but the minor artists frequently pitch
their tents among the sensations as though this were
the end of the world. It would be difficult, perhaps,
for even a minor poet to sound the lyrical cry over
a sevenpenny strawberry or a twenty-five shilling
bundle of asparagus. But that is because the rarity
which is expressed by sevenpence or twenty-five
shillings is not sufficient to produce the necessary
ecstasy even in a poet on a country newspaper.
Suppose, however, the strawberry had cost a slave's
life. Suppose the asparagus had been gathered by
kings' daughters on the banks of an Eastern river
asparagus, I feel sure, does not grow in conditions of
the kind at all and were sold to none but kings and
the friends of kings. Straightway the strawberry
and the asparagus would take on a new value. They
would become, from the sensational point of view,
beautiful things. They would become themes for a
Gautier or a Flaubert. Did not the most artistic of
emperors, Nero, spend 30,000 on roses from Alex-
andria for a single banquet ? Probably in this
twentieth century you can buy roses as beautiful for
a penny at Charing Cross. None of us is thrilled
nowadays by the thought of grapes in January : they
are too common. But a dish of ripe grapes in January
was the most wonderful thing the mediaeval Duchess
could think of when Dr. Faustus put his magic at
her service.

81 G

THE LUXURIOUS EARTH

It would be possible to explain this passion for
rare and strange things as something born of a
winged imagination. It is a desire to escape from
the common round. It is a protest against everyday.
It is the choice of wine above water. Whether it is
an excellent thing to pass one's life thus in exquisite
quarrels with commonness is another matter. The
imaginative life turns as easily to perversity as to
glory. Imagination which is content with conquests
of out-of-season strawberries will have no energy for
flights where the morning stars sing together. The
love of luxury is imagination with sleepy wings.
Good poets have always had to protest against it,
even to the point of praising beans. To desire diffi-
cult fruits too greedily seems in a measure to be a
disparagement of life and the four seasons. Petronius
describes a banquet infinitely more sumptuous than
Plato's ; but it is an insult to day and night. Even
a drunkard on principle will shrink from the vul-
garity of the parvenu who has wine instead of water
poured on the hands of his guests. That is luxury
turned to folly. It is quite unlike the luxury of a
man who squanders his fortune on wines of delicate
flavour. The latter is at least in love with a real
thing : the former only with display. If Beaujolais
were dearer than Chambertin, then the parvenu
would drink Beaujolais. To him there is no differ-
ence between them except in boasting. Clearly it is
impossible to enjoy luxury of this kind and life at
the same time. The luxurious man pleases himself
with the thought that he possesses what other people
lack : in reality, he lacks what other people possess.
Everything that happens in the ordinary course of
nature is to him not a treasure, but a banality. He
despises everything that is not purchasable daffodils
in March, and larks in an April sky, and the sun that
rises and sets every day. He admires the beauties
of Nature only if he has paid a large fare to reach

8J

THE LUXURIOUS EARTH

them. He can admire the sun shining at midnight
in Norway, or the snowy towers of mountains seen
from the grounds of the most expensive hotel in
Switzerland. . . . How one loves to rail at him !
One feels as gay as a Pharisee among one's own
frugal pleasures as one contemplates his million's
worth of misery. One walks out over the little hills
of this happy world as it goes swishing through
space, and one boasts in one's heart that here for an
instant one is lord of glistening growing things and
a roof of music that one would not give in exchange
for many sevenpenny strawberries no, nor for thirty
thousand pounds' worth of Egyptian roses. The
luxuries of the earth are for the most part to be had
without money and without price. Nature is gor-
geous with them the swan on the water brooding
on its windy shadow, the round eyes of robins, the
rooks that walk (absurd breeched creatures) among
the long-haired sheep in the park, the argument of
running water, of running children, the silver and
gold of stars, the brief life of the almond blossom,
the foolish nine-parts-naked man who plunges with
grey head and crimson pants into the cold morning
water, the willow that weeps above him, the black-
bird that sings in the poplar beside the willow, the
cloud that passes like a song, the hide-and-seek of
squirrels is it any wonder if the little hills clap
their hands?

Children alone seem to be in full possession of the
luxuries of the earth. To the child, the fact that a
thing has happened before is no reason why it should
not happen again, and happen beautifully: every-
thing is exciting even at the fiftieth repetition. In
moments of fear and pain the world may be full of
horrible things, but it is never full of dull things.
Mr. Chesterton has noticed the child's appetite for
reality, and has been led by it to conclude that the
child is the only sincere realist. The child does not

83

THE LUXURIOUS EARTH

weary of details as the rest of us do : it cannot have
enough of them. If it wishes to hear about a rail-
way journey, it wants everything from the beginning.
The fact that you drove to the station in a green
taxicab is to it full of romance. It would like to
know the name of the porter who took your luggage.
Every animal, every tree, every flower that you saw
from the train is greedily visioned. What you had
to eat and drink must not be left out. Does not a
child get pleasure even from counting the stairs be-
tween one landing and another ? How could bore-
dom ever enter a house in which the staircase is
a ladder of wonder? If you go into Kensington
Gardens, you will see on all sides this childish
appreciation of the luxurious world. To most of us
there is nothing duller on the earth than those
cylindrical tins in which coffee, Cerebos salt, and
other groceries are sold. But give one of these tins
to a seven-year-old child and he will set it afloat on
the Round Pond, and he and his friends on the bank
will steer it by throwing pebbles in the water round
it all day long. Out of two tiny bits of wood and a
sheet of paper a boat is made which is as thrilling
to the imagination as the Queen Elizabeth. The drake
that bobs his curly tail in the air while he drowns his
coloured neck in the ruffled waves is a beautiful
thing, but the ramshackle boat and the coffee tin do
not yield to him in beauty. Near by, on the grass,
a boy drags after him by a string a small and dirty
cricket bat bound flat to the wheels of a broken toy.
Apparently it is intended to represent a cannon, and
the boy's friend pursues it with a fierce artillery of
stones. As one watches poor children round the pond
making their pleasure out of refuse and broken things,
one is inclined at moments to wonder whether this
happiness of invention, this self-reliant mastery of
one's little world, may not be a greater possession
than the nursed and taught amusements of richer

84

THE LUXURIOUS EARTH

infants. One would imagine that a child that has
to look after itself, to say nothing of its sisters and
brothers, from the age of five would grow up more
powerful and resourceful and leader-like in character
than a child pampered and nursed and school-
mastered from the cradle. But clearly this is not
so. This happiness with anything and everything
is one of the compensations of the poor : it is not
enough in itself to make poverty a blessing. The
empty stomach, the foul air of the narrow street, the
torn boot, the tattered shirt, the earsplitting school-
room these quickly tame the spirit that otherwise
might have become too regal amid its treasures.
These, and the need to serve the need to serve
moreover, in a manner and in a degree in which no
human being ought to have to serve in order to be
permitted to eat at a table and sleep in a bed
that would make most of us ill. Gradually in such
a world a coffee tin ceases to be more than a coffee
tin, and the stairs become a burden. It is so, of
course, with all of us. But those of us who live
above the poverty-line have other sources of luxury
to take the place of pretence and toys. Not many,
perhaps, if we lose entirely the spirit of the child,
but enough to enable us at the very lowest to flit
from one tedious place to another, and to have some
novelty of choice among tedious dishes. I do not,
I may say, myself find the world so dismal a round
as this, and for my friends I desire some middle
place between the extremes of tedium and penury.
But if one had to choose between tedium and penury
who knows ? On the whole, I lean to the seven-
penny strawberry rather than to the empty coffee
tin now that I have left the age of magic behind.

ON SAVING MONEY

To save money is now the eleventh command-
ment. It is a commandment which many people
will find it extremely difficult, and many others
extremely easy, to obey. Some men are pre-
destined to save money. It is no more a virtue with
them than a bad digestion. They would save money
on an income of a hundred pounds. Other men are
predestined to spend money. It is no more a virtue
with them than if they were to weigh fifteen stone.
They could not save on an income of ten thousand a
year. These are two races of men which will never
entirely understand one another. The thrifty man
will seem to his opposite a skinflint rather than a
saviour of the State. The spendthrift, on the other
hand, will not always be taken at his own valuation
as a heart of corn and a generous fellow. He is the
butt of the proverbs. The wisdom of humanity is
against him. " A fool and his money," say the old
wives, " are soon parted." " A penny saved is a
penny earned," they add. " Take care of the pence,"
they develop the theme, " and the pounds will take
care of themselves." The copybooks contain noth-
ing so effective to warn the young against growing
up miserly. It is only on Sundays that we are
advised to take no thought for the morrow, and even
then the text is rolled out for love of the sound
rather than the sense. We seldom meet anyone
above a schoolboy who interprets it literally. I
have never known but one person who recommended
it on the score of practical morals. This was when
as a small boy I had more by luck than by judgment
won a prize of a few pounds fifteen or twenty, if I

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ON SAVING MONEY

am not mistaken but at least it was too large to be
laid out with a good conscience on butterscotch,
nougat, and cheap editions of the Waverley Novels.
There was a theory that it should be put in the
bank; but a charming lady in gold-rimmed spectacles
and a lace cap, with her silver hair curled round
little tortoiseshell combs on each side of her head, per-
suaded me secretly against this, alleging as a reason
that to put money in a bank was to distrust God
Almighty. Dr. Johnson, she declared, naming a
clergyman much respected in the neighbourhood,
had been vehemently of this opinion and had never
put a penny in the bank in his life. I took Dr.
Johnson in this matter alas, in this matter only !
as my model, and no child can ever have paid so
many visits to the confectioner's under the segis of
the New Testament. But it is as rare as a happy
farmer to find the old exhorting the young to live
dangerously in the matter of money. Even those
who talk the most eloquently about living dan-
gerously make haste to secure themselves against
the perils of pennilessness. It is only the saints and
the fools who live dangerously to the point of being
ready to give away all their goods to the poor or
anybody else who happens to be convenient. At the
same time it is a remarkable fact that in the New
Testament it is not the rich who waste their money
that are attacked, but the rich who save it. Saving
money is a virtue which has very little said in its
favour in the source-books of Christianity. The
man with the single talent is the type of the man
who saves for saving's sake. I do not mean to
suggest that the two other men in the parable of
the talents were wastrels. But they were types of
what may be called constructive saving. They did
not save for saving's sake. They were not terrified
of using money. They may have put it in a bank
or invested it. They did not, at least, put it in an

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old stocking. They saved generously and not
meanly. The other fellow was simply the mean
man who takes no risks. To save money without
being mean that is the difficulty which to many
young and fiery natures seems almost insuperable.

Certainly it is difficult to idealize a niggard or a
miser. There are more people who can look
tolerantly on the younger Cato's drunkenness than
on the elder Cato's meanness. The latter's selling
his old war-horse in Spain, in spite of a thousand
associations, in order to save the expense of its trans-
port to Rome has lived in history as one of the most
odious actions ever performed by an illustrious man.
Our instincts are impatient of such meannesses.
They cry out against the reduction of life to a
money measure. Obviously, if saving money is the
highest point of wisdom, we must get rid not only
of old horses, but of old men and women. Shylock's
lament over his ducats and his daughter leaves him
a tragicomic rather than a tragic figure. We hate
to see the very heart and soul of a man haunted by
money in this way. Scotsmen are more jeered at
because one of them once said " Bang went saxpence !"
or perhaps a music-hall comedian invented it
than for any other reason. The Jews are also the
subject of a thousand jokes on account of their
" nearness," to use an old word, with money. Potash
and Perlmiittcr, the Jewish-American play which has
been entertaining all London, is simply a comedy of
the shifting balance between thrift and human feel-
ing. The French peasant seems in his attitude
to money to be not unlike the Jew. Perhaps
Maupassant's peasants are only the mechanical toys
of fiction, but one cannot help suspecting that an
anecdote from life is at the bottom of that story in
which a mother is concerned less about her daughter's
seduction than about the price the girl has extracted
for it. The Irish had not till recently the reputa-

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ON SAVING MONEY

tion of money-savers. But the plays of the Abbey
Theatre have exhibited to us a peasantry as deeply
absorbed in petty economies as the French or the
Jews. We are shown in play after play small
farmers haggling over their parents' deathbeds and
over their daughters' marriage-portions One would
conclude from them that thrift rather than thrift-
lessness must be the leading Irish vice. I have
heard it argued, indeed, that the Irish are wasteful
merely in so far as they have been anglicized : that
they have modelled themselves too slavishly on the
most wasteful nation on the earth. Probably this
is at least nine parts untrue. The English are cer-
tainly an extraordinarily wasteful people, but they
are wasteful out of an abundance. Theirs is a
solvent wastefulness. They keep within the limits
prescribed by Mr. Micawber for happy expenditure.
It is (in the wealthier classes) individualistic, even
egoistic, expenditure, but on the whole it is on the
right side of bankruptcy. No doubt, the industrial
revolution had much to do with introducing this
element of practical sense into English wastefulness.
The English aristocrat of the eighteenth century,
even when he was a Prime Minister, was as extra-
vagant and as cheerful under his debts as a stage
Irishman. If there were a superfluity for everybody,
one might rejoice in this golden open-handedness.
But in a world in which the resources have never
got quite fairly adjusted to the needs of the popu-
lation one can only applaud spendthrifts with reserve.
They are usually wasting other people's dinners.
There is one curious type of spendthrift who is a
spendthrift abroad, but a miser in his own home.
There is scarcely a public-house without an example
of him. His generosity is all selfishness. He finds
it easy to stint his family: he finds it impossible
to stint his boon companions.
Thus one can never judge a man merely by the
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ON SAVING MONEY

fact that he saves or spends money. There may be
all sorts of good or bad reasons for doing either. I
knew a man who used to invite his friends to high
tea, and who thought nothing of interrupting the
conversation to adjure them: "For God's sake, go
easy with the butter !" Even in so extreme an in-
stance of economy as this it would be a mistake to
dismiss the man as a miser. Men have a hundred
motives for saving. They may be supporting poor
relations, or devoting their money to a cause, or
going to get married. As for the man who saves
money without a considerable motive he is beyond
understanding. I have known a rich man who
would run himself out of breath for a hundred yards
in order that his 'bus might cost him a penny instead
of twopence. I have heard others relating with glee
how they discovered a shop here and a shop there
where they were able to effect some trivial economy
at an enormous expense of labour. Saving money,
I suppose, has with these people become a sort of
game or hobby, like collecting stamps. The human
being is a playful creature and must amuse itself.

Perhaps the official call for economy will result in
the invention of a new game in which households
will compete against each other in such things as
miserly dinners. Certainly the new conditions will
enable the least miserly to take up saving money
either as a hobby or as a reputable mission in life.
The generous man will no longer feel he is casting a
slur on things in general by drinking water instead
of wine, or by taking a 'bus where a taxicab would
do, or by returning to his house with as much money
in his pocket as when he left it. It is a vin ordinaire
world into which the war has precipitated us. How
skimping a time lies before us comes home to the
imagination as we read the official German recom-
mendations in regard to changes in the standard of
living. Here is a typical passage from them :

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ON SAVING MONEY

" The value of the refuse is frequently not realized.
How much can be saved by peeling potatoes pro-
perly has already been mentioned. All meat and
fish refuse should be carefully used. All bones,
skins, sinews, and smoked rinds can be boiled down
and used for soups and with vegetables, and from the
bones, heads, and roes of herrings good sauces can
be made, for instance, for potatoes. The waste from
vegetables and fruit should also be used. Cabbage
stalks and celery leaves when cut into small pieces
make a good seasoning for many dishes ; fruit peel
and seeds make syrup, soup and jelly."

Starched ladies' petticoats and starched shirt-
fronts are condemned, because starch is made from
what might be used as food ; and patriots are advised
even to " economise soap in washing clothes, be-
cause soap is largely produced from edible fats."
Who of us had ever realized we were living so
luxuriously ? Perhaps we shall yet be told that we
shave too often or waste too much money on polish-
ing our boots, or use knives and forks uneconomi-
cally on many articles of food for which our fingers
would do as well. Assuredly the Simple Lifers are
inheriting the earth. One forsees dismally a world
of potato skins, cabbage stalks, and cold water.
Aged bon-vivants will have to dye their hair and
smuggle themselves into the Army in order to get a
decent plate of roast beef. . . . But perhaps the
prospect is not so black as it at first appears. After
all, if one wants a charming dinner at a low price,
the economical French are more likely to give it to
one than the wasteful English. If the reign of
economy results in the general spread of French
cookery, there are a few scatterpennies at least who
will not complain too bitterly.

PEACE ON EARTH

Everybody desires peace as everybody desires to
go to Heaven. Peace on earth, of course, not peace
with Germany. Peace on earth means to the average
man the liberty to wear a rosy face in the bosom of
his family on Christmas Day, and the liberty to swell
with a double dinner on Christmas evening. Possibly
when he reads about the blessings of universal peace
in the papers and hears about it from the platform,
he interprets this as meaning the blessings of a
world in which he could live thus rosily all the year
round. Perhaps that is his vision of Heaven, too.
Most of our visions can be interpreted in terms of
the price list of Messrs. Fortnum and Mason.

Certainly when we try to fly a little higher than
that in our visions of a better world we leave ninety-
nine men in a hundred cold. There is nothing that
the ordinary man shrinks from more nervously than
the idea of having to live in one of those Utopias
which various Pacifist and Socialist writers are never
tired of painting. Even as regards Heaven as it is
commonly pictured for us, he wants to go there not
because he thinks it is preferable to earth, but
only because he thinks it is preferable to hell. It is
the same with our dream of peace. We love it not
for its own sake, but only when it is contrasted with
the filth of war. Even while we praise it most
warmly we have misgivings. We wonder at times
whether, after all, it might not mean the supersession
of brave men with guns by base creatures with
nothing but gullets. We can no more comfortably
imagine a world without arms than the world as it
would have been if Adam and Eve had not eaten
the apple. We idealize the Garden of Eden, but we

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PEACE ON EARTH

realize only this battered earth. William Morris
tried to paint for us something like a Garden of
Eden in News from Nowhere. But, radiant and em-
broidered with all the happinesses as that world was,
the average man would as soon be a fish as live in it.
We cannot get rid of the feeling that the air there is
stagnant. And, as experiments have recently shown,
even pure air that is stagnant has a more disastrous
effect on us than impure air that is in motion. If
this air that we breathe in the twentieth century is
impure, it is still moving. We feel we are living in
the great world and not in a glass case. The
problem for the Pacifist, as for the Socialist, is to
construct some other than a glass-case Utopia.
Until he can do this, he might as well address his
appeals to the wax figures in Madame Tussaud's as
to ordinary men and women.

It is often taken for granted by the preachers of
war-at-any-price that the Pacifist is condemned out
of hand by his Utopia. But this is nonsense. No
man is condemned by his Utopia. If it comes to
comparing Utopias, what about the Utopia of the
war party itself, supposing it to be logical enough to
have a Utopia ? If war is the supreme school of
valour, as the Treitschkes and the Bernhardis seem
to believe, how much of war will be necessary to
give us a perfectly valorous world ? Will a war
every generation do ? Or must we have a war every
ten years ? Or every year ? Or every week ? The
truth is, none of the war-at-any-price party dare sit
down and paint in detail his Utopia of carnage. If
the Utopia of peace is like lukewarm milk with the
skin on it, the Utopia of war is like blood in buckets.
One may use the same method of answering those
who frown contempt on the Utopias of Socialists
and express their enthusiasm for a competitive
world. Let them describe a day in their Utopia of
competition and see if the result is not more horrible

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PEACE ON EARTH

than the police-court news in a Sunday paper.
Chemist would poison chemist, and draper would lie
in wait for draper with his yard-measure. It would
be a world in which the strong man would not
temper his strength with pity or the cunning man
dilute his cunning with morality. Every man would
be at every other man's throat instead of, as at
present, merely at his pocket. It would be a world
mad with the beastliness at which even the beasts
draw the line. This, however, does not disturb the
anti-Socialist in the slightest. He judges only his
neighbours by their Utopias. The fact is: the people
who are most impatient with Utopias are usually
those who are fairly well satisfied with the present
day. They are the persons who are least affected
by the horrors of war or poverty these and the
persons who are least hopeful of ever being able to
get rid of them. There is no reason why anyone
should be at all enamoured with peace on earth, if
the earth as it is, dusty and deaf with strife, suits
him (as he would say) down to the ground. That
kind of man does not believe in the logic of war or
the logic of competition any more than he believes
in the logic of peace or Socialism. He believes only
in the present day with the comforts, or it may be
the bare necessities, it brings him. He repeats
" Peace on earth " merely because it is an orthodox
saying of the present era. He accepts it as he
accepts a municipal gasworks. It is something
already in existence, not a mere grasping after the
air in the middle of next week. So long as he is not
asked to look forward further than he can see
through a telescope, he does not protest. But
beyond that it is too distant from his fireside ; it is
a world of cold and inhuman places. The last thing
in which man will become adventurous is sociology.
He feels in his bones that the South Pole itself is a
million miles nearer than Utopia.

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PEACE ON EARTH

Is there any way of making the Utopia of Peace
less null and void than it has a way of being at
present ? Or must Pacifists always be content to
prostrate themselves before a negation, like Buddhists
before the dream of Nirvana? "Where there is
nothing there is God " runs a sentence out of which
Mr. Yeats made a title for one of his plays. Are we
also to rise or, if you prefer it, to sink into the faith
that only where there is nothing there is peace? Not
entirely. Perhaps, however, for the flesh-and-blood
man there must be a certain nothingness about all
ideals. It is the approach to the ideal, not the ideal
itself, in which our realistic passions engage them-
selves with the greatest confidence and delight. The
ideal is like the angle o in trigonometry : it is im-
possible to imagine it, and it is impossible get on
without imagining it. So we take it for granted. It
is equally impossible for bullying and quarrelsome
creatures like ourselves to imagine Liberty, Equality,
and Fraternity in their full implications with regard
to human relationships. But France took the idea
for granted, and, instead of worshipping it in its
ideal nothingness, leaped towards it as if it were a
real thing ; and that leap was the French Revolution.
That is the plan on which we are created. We
understand the end chiefly in terms of a journey.
Our goal may be nothing more than two sticks
crossed by a third, but the whole passion of our life
is in the heave and swing of the struggle to reach
that goal. That explains why it is that so many
Pacifists are fierce and fiery fellows. They have
their eyes on the goal of peace, but in their essay
towards it they, too, experience all the intoxication
and fury of the great game of idealism. If you are
in search of gentleness of speech, you might as well
go to the battlefield for it as to Gustav Herv6 or
Emile Vandervelde.

Perhaps those who do most to discredit peace as

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PEACE ON EARTH

an ideal are the people who wish to convert it into
bourgeois politics. Peace means to them not the
rise of a new civilization, but merely the setting up
of a great fat policeman called Peace over civiliza-
tion as we now know it. They want peace among
the great Empires because war is so expensive.
Their ideal hardly goes beyond an agreement be-
tween England and Germany to keep small, cheap
armies and navies instead of big, dear armies and
navies. People of this mood would regard it as an
affair of minor importance if every small nation in
Europe, from Ireland to Georgia in the Caucasus,
were to be deprived of even the elements of self-
government for ever and ever. Their denial of the
right of war would include the denial of the right of
insurrection, and, if they had their way, wars for
liberty would be prohibited as severely as wars for
plunder. One can, of course, understand and respect
the religious objection to war the objection of Tol-
stoy and the Quakers. There is something extra-
ordinarily persuasive in Tolstoy's picture in Ivan the
Fool of the nation that keeps turning the other cheek
so often that other nations get tired of invading it
and get won to its innocent love of peace. It is
difficult to deny that such a miracle of childlikeness
on the part of a whole nation might conquer the
world. Certainly we shall be ready for the reign of
universal peace by the time an entire nation can be
found to turn the other cheek, not through timidity,
but with cheerfulness and courage. But cheerful-
ness and courage are the only things which could
possibly justify any nation or any individual in
turning the other cheek in literal Christian obe-
dience. Somebody once said that to be poor in
spirit is a very different thing from being poor-
spirited. If our love of peace is poor-spirited, it is
no improvement on our fathers' love of war. There
was a league formed a year or two ago called the

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PEACE ON EARTH

League of Peace through Liberty. That title has a
better ring about it than if it were a mere league for
peace without any reservations. But, as a matter of
fact, the number of persons, apart from religious
idealists, who call for peace at any price is almost
as small as the number of just men who could be
found in the Cities of the Plain. Most of us believe
in peace so long as peace is consistent with ordinary
human decency. But when every reason for peace
is stripped from us except selfishness or cowardice,
then our consciences begin to whisper to us that war
is at least better than that.

97

GRUB

One cannot travel much in these days, even on the
top of a bus, without overhearing a great deal of the
conversation of soldiers. If the soldiers are strangers
to each other, it is ten to one that, as soon as they
have found out in what part of the country their
respective camps are, they will go on to exchange
experiences about food. " What's the food like ? "

" Oh, good food. Eggs and bacon for breakfast "

" Eggs ? We don't get no eggs except what's sent
from home. We don't get no eggs, I can tell you.
Eggs and bacon ! " " Yes, three times a week. Oh,
I reckon the food's all right. Then, for the rest of

the week, herrin's " " Herrin's ! Gripes, we

don't get no herrin's " " Then for dinner some

kind of meat, and peas " "Peas? Help!"

" And potatoes, and after that rice, p'r'aps, and
stewed prunes." " 'Strewth ! You're lucky. Where
I am you could 'ardly eat the food, even if there
was enough of it. Our cook never washes 'is 'ands.
Dirty, greasy 'ands 'e 'as. Puts 'em all over every-
thing. It ain't food gets served to us. It's a mess.
One day after dinner we was nearly all sick.
Couldn't eat anything for twenty-four hours after-
wards. Then, after dinner I likes a cup of tea. I
don't reckon I've 'ad my dinner unless I get tea with
it." " We 'ave tea." " I'd give anything for a cup
of tea." " Oh, we ain't got nothin' to complain of,"
replies the other, with a slight, boastful yawn ;
" never tasted better grub in my life. 'Ow much
d'you think I put on since I joined? " " 'Ow much? "
"One stone eight. One stone yte!" "Oh, go
an' scratch your neck with a broken bottle," his wife

98

GRUB

jeers across the 'bus at him with a facetiousness
learned in the music-halls. " 'E's always boastin'
about wot 'e eats," she tells the starved one. " 'E
wants 'is blasted fish filleted now ! " ...

There you have scraps of conversation, not
invented in imitation of Mr. Pett Ridge, but set
down as literally as memory and an incapacity for
the correct misspelling of dialect will allow. They
are typical of many soldiers' conversations that have
recently reached one's ears in fragments. They are
typical, I believe, of the way in which not all, but
hundreds of thousands of soldiers talk. " All the
boys as fit as fiddles," said a soldier to me some
time ago, describing his regiment, "and the last
thing you'd 'ear anybody mention is the war! " No
doubt soldiers, like journalists, have their thoughts
about Huns and the other things that are written
about in the newspapers. But, unlike journalists,
they do not devote twenty-four hours of the day to
rhetoric. They hold fast to the more solid and per-
manent human interests. They do not make haste
to anticipate horrors as do the " realize-the-war "
school of speech-makers and leader-writers. They
are patient of the passing day, and while there is
sport to be had or food and drink calling for praise,
they are not to be intimidated out of their enjoy-
ments. This, perhaps, would not be a possible
attitude for an entire nation in time of war. It may
even be argued that it would not be a desirable
attitude for an entire nation in time of peace. But,
whether in peace or war, how infinitely healthier
and more efficient it is than that rake's progress of
hysterics without ideals which appeals to so many
people just now as the most heroic form of
patriotism. . . .

It is amazing, considering how curious and in-
satiate is the human appetite, that so little has been
written in praise of food. There has probably been

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GRUB

less good poetry written in praise of eating than of
any other decent human pleasure. Drinking has
always been recognised as a proper subject of
poetry, but eating has only been introduced into
literature comically and by the satirists. When
Horace wrote of wine, he wrote as a worshipper.
When he wrote of food, he wrote scornfully as an
abstemious man who was content with beans. To
be comparably abstemious with wine has at many
periods been thought actually discreditable ; as in
Athens, where the enemies of Demosthenes tried to
injure him by denouncing him as a water-drinker.
Abstemiousness in food, on the other hand, has
always been regarded as the mark of a hero and
philosopher ; gluttony, of a villain. Sulla was a
glutton. Cyrus, Caesar, and most of the great con-
querors, were careless about food. Could Juliet
have fallen in love with Romeo if he had had the
gut of Trimalchio ? Has there ever been a lover in
literature who ate to excess ? Even the authors who
have praised eating with most enthusiasm have sel-
dom praised it apart from liquor, though they never
scruple to praise liquor apart from food. The
aesthetes dwelt lovingly on ortolans, but it was
ortolans plus Chambertin. What man of letters
has ever glorified a teetotal dinner of six or seven
courses ? It would seem too disgusting. Perhaps
in each of us there lingers just a suspicion of disgust
against eating. We have no pleasure in contem-
plating all this energy of chewing and insalivation.
There is humiliation in being so much of a beast.
It was some sense of this that made Byron detest
the sight of a beautiful woman eating. Probably
there is a stage in the lives of many sensitive young
amorists at which they share this detestation.
Women used to be more aware of this than they
now are. In the Victorian era, if we can trust the
records, the girl who aifected to be unable to cope

100

GRUB

with the undivided wing of a chicken was common
enough at genteel tables. The genteel small appetite
has disappeared as a convention. But in the bloom
of life, it may be, lovers are still given to fasting in
each other's company, not so much because they are
absent-minded as because they have a feeling that
eating is no business for creatures of ecstasy such as
they. It is all part of the ancient disparagement of
the appetite. Mr. Chesterton, if I remember right,
once justified the praise of liquor rather than the
solid foods on the ground that drinking has spiritual
and imaginative effects such as are unknown to the
mere eater. An excess of beer opens a door into a
kingdom, if it be only for a moment. An excess of
ham sandwiches I think Mr. Chesterton used rail-
way-station ham sandwiches in his illustration only
leaves the stodgy man stodgier than before. When
Mr. Chesterson argued on these lines he had not
seen the gleam that comes into the eye of a
twentieth-century soldier at the mention of duck and
green peas. One of the most remarkable results of
the European war has been a great diminution in
the praise of liquor and a parallel increase in the
glorification of beef and bread.

As a matter of fact, the common man has never
been a miser in his appreciation of food. It is only
the poets and genteel persons who have pretended
that eating is something which ought not to be dis-
cussed in polite society. Literature is a form of
intoxication, and so men of letters, like other artists,
have never tired of praising Bacchus and Venus.
But the common people still march in the train of
Ceres, and anthropologists tell us that even our
Easter holidays are a celebration of the rebirth of
the food supply. They go so far as to suggest
that Christianity originated in the worship of a
vegetation deity. Bethlehem, they assure us, should
be translated the House of Bread. I confess to a

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rooted scepticism in regard to theories which over-
simplify, but it would scarcely be possible to exagger-
ate the part which concern for the food supply has
played in the history of religion. Even the Promised
Land, which is still for so many Christians the symbol
of that Paradise from which we are exiles, has always
been painted in terms of food as a land flowing with
milk and honey. Man in the early days was eager
to eat his Eden. He was eager to eat his god.
Food seemed to him a sort of insecure and divine
miracle. If he had been born intelligent he would
have realized that the world was so replete with food
that there was no need to make such a fuss about
them. But man was not born intelligent. He has
not even yet grown intelligent. He is still in a sweat
about his food as though there were not enough to
go round, and each of us had to steal his portion at
the expense of a neighbour. The air is winged with
food ; the sea and the rivers that fall into the sea
pour it in shoals from sunrise to sunset and from
pole to pole ; the earth is coloured and clamorous
with it. It is as if every landscape were loud with
eatable things. The golden age of plenty has always
been with us if we had but cared to live in it. One
might parody Stevenson and say with truth that
"the world is so full of eatable things, I'm sure we
should all be as happy as kings." But we have pre-
ferred to doubt the exuberant earth and to malign
her for a niggard. If we had any real reverence for
the earth we would no more dream of acquiescing in
private ownership of food than of acquiescing in
private ownership of the air. True, our food has a
thousand enemies in the ardour of the sun and
plagues and tempests and rains, and Nature is not
such a prodigal as to teach us to be fools. But it is
seldom, at least in these climates, that she will refuse
her children bread. If any man goes hungry it is
less likely that Nature is at fault than that humanity

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has blundered. May one hope that the multiplica-
tion of good meals which has been brought about by
the war will remain as a permanent social fact when
the war is over ? One hears it continually said that
an army marches on its stomach. Is not this as
true of a nation as of an army ? It may be all very
well to be careless of our own food, like Montaigne,
who always ate the dish nearest to him, or Thoreau,
who declared he could dine off a fried rat, but the
virtue of carelessness about the food of others is less
obvious. . . .

Perhaps the best thing that could happen to
European society would be that we should all begin
to imitate the soldiers, and confess our meals one to
another, the rich to the poor, the landlord to the
labourer, at casual meetings in the streets and on
'buses. One would like to see a duke pausing at the
gates of Hyde Park to exchange accounts of the
previous day's meals with a road-sweeper. Not that
a duke is necessarily more greedy than a journalist.
But, generally speaking, he is more symbolic of vast
wealth and of a world in which neither tinned sal-
mon nor tripe is regarded as a luxury. One would
like, too, to see a bishop button-holing a docker and
explaining to him with tears in his eyes how he had
given up dessert as a war-time economy. Mutual
confessions of this kind would surely make for a
better understanding between (in the jingling phrase)
the classes and the masses. . . . Ultimately they
might even lead to the institution of one of the
most necessary forms of human equality equality
(more or less) of dinners.

103

ON TAKING A WALK IN
LONDON

There was a Londoner who confessed the other
day that he had taken to walking a part of the way
to his office in the morning. He does not do it for
pleasure, he said. He does not do it for economy.
He does it from a feeling that at a time when so
many human beings are engaged in physical combat
one ought to keep one's body from falling below a
certain level of fitness. He finds these morning
walks, he declares, dull beyond words. He only
manages to get through them by counting his steps
as he walks. He finds interest in the discovery that
the number of steps he takes to a mile does not vary
beyond five or six from one day to another. He also
enjoys marking the quarter-miles along the way by
lamp-posts, pillar-boxes and other signs. Is London,
then, such a desert to the senses as is implied by
this ? Other men have asserted that it is a second
Bagdad, and that one has only to pass behind a
wall to discover a painted and mysterious life sur-
passing the Arabian Nights. Certainly, in so popu-
lous a city, to which ships come from the islands
at the bottom of the world, where men of curious
colours dwell, it would be surprising if everything
were prosaic. One can more easily believe that
romance sits like a secret in every window, and that
out of every door beauty and adventure may sud-
denly appear. There is not a stucco house in a
stucco street but a door may open at any moment,
and out may come a Chinaman, or an Irishman, or

104

ON TAKING A WALK IN LONDON

a Jewess. As one grows older one forgets that this
is so, or becomes indifferent. But even a bald man
has only to see the life of a street represented on a
cinematograph to realize how interesting and un-
expected it all is. If we were a higher race of beings,
how excited we should be by the records of the life
and vanities of these human animals passing in and
out of their burrows ! They are more amazing than
ants. They are funnier than penguins. They look
now like bears, now like eagles, now like sheep, now
like serpents. They are all the animals in turn,
except that they walk on two legs and have pink
or brown or yellow skins. How can we pass the
burrows, caves and nests of this oddest of the families
of creatures and yet feel uninterested as if we were
walking between blank walls ? Or is there a genuine
reason for our dullness ? Is there something tedious
about these human houses which we do not find in
nests and the lairs of beasts ? Perhaps there is.
The eagle, we may be sure, builds his nest solely with
a view to its excellence as a nest. The wasp hangs
its house in the thorn-bush with no thought but of
living happily in it. The coral insect if it is an
insect I speak without prejudice raises a structure
more wonderful than the Pyramids above the surface
of the sea without any notion of letting it out after-
wards at a profit. It is not mere indulgence in the
luxury of morality when one sees in this the reason
why the houses of animals are so interesting and the
houses of human beings so dull. If each of us built
his own house, like Thoreau, or for that is impos-
sible if they were built singlemindedly for the use
and pleasure of those who have to live in them, our
streets would become rich in individuality and sig-
nificance. As it is, the taint of trade is upon them.
They are built by men who desire to foist upon us
a minimum of excellence for a maximum of profit.
How could a decent house grow up in this spirit ?

105

ON TAKING A WALK IN LONDON

How could beauty come out of so profane a door ?
How could mystery sit at so mean a window ?

The truth is there are few streets or avenues in
London which, so far as the houses are concerned,
justify themselves as a walk on a fine summer
morning. One has to turn from the houses them-
selves to the eccentricities of the human animals
that scurry and crawl and glide along the pavements.
One will not easily get tired in London so long as
one is interested in observing the shapes of men and
women and children. Here are seven millions of
them, each as different from the other as two nations,
most of them walking up and down streets, or up and
down shops, or up and down stairs all their lives.
One would imagine that it would require a city even
to bury their dead bodies : one would imagine that
seven million bodies could not be smuggled into the
earth without raising a mountain on its surface. It
is morbid, however, and, for all we know, false, to
regard man too consistently as a doomed creature.
His doom may be a mere incident a mere slough-
ing of a skin in the adventures of a god. As he
walks the streets of London he is, to be sure, a god
a little dilapidated, a god shambling, a god that has
seen better days. He may be a god with a stiff neck
or (as you may infer from the advertisements) a god
with a bad leg. He may be a god with disasters in
every passage in the labyrinth of his body the
passages of breath and blood and bile. But be he
diseased or' crippled, or be he hidden under a silk
hat, the seer will discover him and announce the
glory of his origin and his end. The seer may, of
course, be a liar, but he has at least discovered a
means of bringing space and brightness into the
streets. He sees even grocers as slim-cheeked cari-
catures of divinity grocers who try to make you
buy Danish butter instead of the butter you want
on the ground that " the Danes, you know, are per-

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ON TAKING A WALK IN LONDON

fectly loyal to us, sir," or apologize for not serving
you with a Dutch cheese on the plea that " trade
with Holland has fallen off during the war. The
Dutch, I fear, madam, favour the other side." No
street that contains a grocer's shop is entirely dull.
If you find it so, go in and see the grocer that
starveling Zeus in shirt-sleeves who commands the
map of the world for the materials on which he
makes his penny profits. Tea from China and Ceylon,
dates from Persia, olives from Italy, coffee from
Arabia, oranges from Spain, nuts from Brazil, oil
from Mexico, sago from Borneo, rice from Java,
pine-apples from Australia, fish (in tins) from the
seven seas, nutmegs and pepper from blue-robed
islands, almost everything in his shop a seafarer
one has only to look into the man's window to travel.
He does not, it may be, display the profuse colours
of foreign countries to us as the fruiterer does. He
does not communicate the glory of the earth, but
rather he has tinned and bottled and spiced and
weighed and papered it as, to say truth, he would
pack up the Milky Way itself in blue and brown bags
if it were saleable. But none the less he is tied to
romance as by a string. He mixes romance with
his prose as when he magnificently describes himself
as an Italian warehouseman.

But there are streets in London into which not
even the grocers' shops bring any brightness. There
are streets so dismal that they could scarcely be
more so if every house-front were hung with crape.
Malodorous, unswept, grey, they are haunts of
butchers' flies, they reek with the smell of fried
fish and green peas, their windows are all sweat
and dust, the confectioners sell picture-postcards of
squeezing couples, the newsagents sell snuff and to-
bacco, a shave costs three-halfpence, old clothes
dangle on cords outside the second-hand clothes
shops and defeat the fried fish with a worse smell.

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ON TAKING A WALK IN LONDON

They would be like streets of the dead if the placard
of a Northcliffe paper did not at intervals proclaim
panic outside a newsagent's shop in purple and
scarlet letters. Who would willingly go walking in
such a sty ? It is no wonder that man has fled under-
ground from such sights and smells in his daily
travels. London, taken as a whole, is a city of mean
streets. That humanity with its heroism and its
cheerful laughter has survived existence in these rows
of hired stalls suggests that the seer who spies a god
in man is nearer the truth than the pessimist who
spies an insect. Perhaps it is a sort of genteel
cowardice, but, in spite of this, there are many of us
who would rather our children had never been
born than that they should be born into such sur-
roundings. . . .

But I had intended to speak of the pleasures of
walking in London, of the constant sense of dis-
covery as one passes the doors, of the constant
speculation on one thing and another. London
bubbles with sights. There is entertainment even
in the sight of a sweep's broom over a shop with the
announcement that the proprietor combines the pro-
fessions of chimney-sweep and carpet-beater. It
seems absurd for some reason or other that a sweep
should beat carpets. One comes again on a sign in
a shabby street, " Ostrich feathers cleaned, French
and English style," and one is pleased to have added
to one's list of queer trades. Nor does one ever
cease to be fascinated by the sight of those glass
cases full of false teeth which are displayed outside
the doorways of cheap dentists. They are horrible,
they are ugly, they are worse than butchers' shops.
But there is a kind of mockery in them, as in skele-
tons, which pleases us. They are a jeer at the beauty
of man. And when we see beneath them the notice,
" Old false teeth bought," we get a shudder of repul-
sion such as we never got from Baudelaire. Who

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ON TAKING A WALK IN LONDON

is it that sells old false teeth ? Where do they come
from ? From the mouth of a dead man ? Who
wears them afterwards ? This is speculation among
horrors. . . .

Perhaps, if you want to feel comfortable, you had
better take no walks in London except in the parks
and squares and down Piccadilly and along the river.
In the daytime at any rate. At night it is different.
Night turns London from a collection of suburbs
into a stage, and one passes into a world of wonder-
ful and fleeting figures which seem capable of love
and murder and beauty and everything except what
is commonplace. This is especially so since the
lights were lowered owing to the war. Lamps that
used to gleam like great flares now peep like dying
candles high above the Tartarean streets. One
imagines that a city lit by glow-worms would be
less pitch-black than this. The low lighting has had
at least the fortunate effect of enabling us to see the
buildings and streets in mass instead of in detail ;
they loom out of the night with an unexpected ma-
jesty. To walk in London at night in these times
cannot be so much less wonderful than to have
walked among the temples of Athens by starlight.
It is by many people, indeed, being revelled in as a
luxury. . . . That is why the lights must be
turned on again, full blaze, as soon as the war is
over. We must never be allowed to enjoy walking
in London till London has been made fit to walk in.
And that will not be till it is as fit to live in as, in
their own kinds, an ant-hill or a bird's nest.

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At the last door on the left my papers were taken
from me, and I was told to sit down and wait. There
was a flat wooden form outside the door. Down the
middle of the hall other long seats had been laid
back to back, and a hundred or more weary-looking
men sat on them, some of them talking to each other,
some of them silently gazing into space or shifting
their thin legs on the uncomfortable seats. They
had, all of them, I think, been medically rejected at
a previous examination. Some of them certainly did
not look the part at least, not in their clothes. But
most of them had the wasted appearance, so common
in London, of half-sucked pear-drops. Among them
a little hunchback sat, dangling his feet solitarily;
another man sat at the far side of the hall, a
well-dressed man, his shoulders and head twitching
beyond control. On the whole, they were a lean
and depressed company. A lean man in a bowler-hat
and glasses, who sat beside me, told me that he had
just recovered from pleuro-pneumonia. The sun
came swelteringly in on us through the glass roof
where the awning had fallen to pieces and hung
down ragged and dirty. Everywhere one had a
vision of melting brows, of veins swelling on temples,
of veins swelling on hands. One turned one's eyes
from the men to the walls and read an endless
number of ugly yellow posters giving particulars
about separation allowances for soldiers' wives and
blazoning forth mottoes such as: "You are helping
the Germans if you use a motor-car for pleasure."
One waited for something to happen, but for a long
time nothing happened. Occasionally a soldier or an

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old wrinkled clerk would come out of a door with a
paper in his hand and walk leisurely to another door.
He would be watched on his passage as by Argus.
He would disappear and leave us in dullness. He
would reappear and a crowd of eyes would once
more follow him from door to door. Sometimes a
fat, bright-eyed young Jew, with a smile that never
changed either to spread or diminish, would stop
one of these people in order to make sure that his
case had not been missed. . . .

One hoped it would be all over by lunch-time.
The dapper man, tall as a tree and thin as a skeleton,
who had brought the Times with him and was
working through it column by column, would soon
have reached the last page. At length a soldier with
a big stomach came out of a room with an armful
of papers and began calling out names. People rose
from all sides and gathered round him like hens
hurrying to a meal. He shouted them back to their
seats and ordered that none but those he named
should approach him. Then he called out another
name. " Here ! " answered a voice sharp as a rifle-
shot. The soldier paused and looked at the little
man running up to him. "You've been in the Army
before," he said. " Yes, sergeant," the little man
admitted. "I knew it," said the sergeant; "no place
like the Army for learning manners." He then began
to march down the hall roaring names, as it were,
out of the back of his head, like a railway-porter
shouting out a list of stations. He was followed by
a draggle of men anxiously listening in the hope of
recognising their own names amid the inarticulate
bellowing. Another soldier began to call out other
names at the far end of the hall. After each list
was ended, the men who had not been mentioned
sat back and shook their heads at each other with
resigned smiles. An official passing by stooped
down and commented : " It's a bloody farce. They'll

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examine a hundred men and not get ten. You'll
see."

For a farce, I confess, I found it dull. I thought
that cattle penned up closely at a fair and left unsold
till the end of a hot day must feel very much as we
did. In the end the soldier with the big stomach
came out and told us that we shouldn't be examined
before lunch now, and that we might go away for
three-quarters of an hour and have something to eat.
I went into the street and bought a Star to see what
had happened in the outside world. I felt that a
great battle might easily have been won while I was
waiting on the hard bench outside the wooden room
in the hall of the White City. I saw a Lyons tea-
shop and suggested to the man who had had pneu-
monia that we might go and have some coffee. " I
have never been in a Lyons's shop," he said hesita-
tingly, "what is it like?" I did not know that such
innocence existed in London. " I always prefer a
cook-shop myself," he said, with a sad look up and
down, and he walked across the road to a public-house.

When I got back to the White City I ran into
another man who had also had pneumonia. He
drew a little square figure in the air with his fore-
finger and told me that there was a patch of that
size missing from his right lung. I sat down on a
bench beside him. " Do you mind if I smoke an
asthma cigarette ? " he said, as though it were a
jest, and lit one. We had hardly begun to talk
when a man with heart-disease came up a tall,
pallid young man, very straight in the back, with
a man-of-the-world smile and a man-of-the-world
cigarette. He said that he had just been examined
and had been ordered to undergo a special examin-
ation at a heart hospital. " I regard that as a
distinctly hopeful sign," he said. Soldiers and clerks
continued to walk at intervals from door to door,
and occasionally one of the soldiers would march off

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with a brood of invalids to the dressing-room. The
rest of us said, " Hard luck ! " and waited prostrate
with the heat for the next roll-call. A man at the
far end of the hall opened a lemonade stall. I took
Scott's Lives of the Novelists out of my pocket and
tried to read it. In five minutes I put it back again,
yawning. I continued to yawn for three solid hours
hours as solid and heavy as lead. I had arrived
at eleven in the morning. It was half-past four
before I heard my name called, and was taken with
a number of other men into a wooden hutch and
told to undress. Clothes were lying all about as in a
bathing-box. Some men were struggling into their
trousers; others were clambering out of them. One
little man who had just been examined was the skin-
niest human being I ever saw. He had not enough
flesh on his bones to make a decent-sized chicken.
He was as bald as a block of ice save for a fringe of
grey hairs on each side of his skull, and altogether
he looked in his glasses like a little wizened creature
of seventy. Other men were to be seen wearing
belts, bands and trusses round various parts of their
bodies. One felt at times as though one must be
at a holy well among people who were awaiting
miraculous cures rather than among young men in
the prime of life about to be chosen as warriors in a
great war. Horace Walpole once declared, on an
occasion when every invalid and cripple in the House
of Commons had been whipped up to vote against
John Wilkes, that the floor of the House looked like
nothing so much as the Pool of Bethesda. Here
was London's Pool of Bethesda, with the sick and
the maimed cursing the whole business indignantly
under their breath. Through a doorway one had a
view of the examination-room, which was full of
naked men, with doctors listening at their chests
or making them dance before them with strange
gestures. We were permitted to wear our jackets

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as a part-covering till the actual examination should
begin. Suddenly the half-naked man beside me, an
attractive-looking youth with delicately curved nose
and a wing of gravel-coloured hair, closed his eyes
and drooped his head like a dying chicken. He
began to gasp, and his head swayed backwards and
forwards over his chest like a ship plunging in a
heavy sea. I wondered if he was about to have a fit
or was dying. I saw myself skipping forth, a pard-
like spirit beautiful and swift, in my little short jacket
and with my long hairy legs, to summon the assist-
ance of the doctors in the next room. "Are you
feeling ill ? " I inquired. " No, no," he answered,
opening his eyes wearily; "it's only asthma. Haven't
you ever seen it before ? " Other men tripped back
from being examined : some of them with patient,
contemptuous smiles; others flushed with indig-
nation and sprinkling the already foul air with
"bloodies," all of them rather like undergraduates
exchanging experiences after an " oral." I watched
a bearded doctor in his shirt-sleeves through the
doorway, as he popped his stethoscope over a chest
that seemed to me to be the chest of an athlete.

The examination-room itself was a long wooden
room, with a row of tables littered wi}h books of
official forms and papers, and with clerks writing
slowly at them as though each separate letter were
a work of national importance. The room was
divided into sections by red screens. In every
section a man stood in his skin while a doctor
examined his teeth or palpated his chest or jigged
him in the groin, calling out such things as " vari-
cocele left " to the clerks, who solemnly wrote it
all down. The doctors, I must say, were a good-
humoured lot. If one was disgusted, it was when
one's eye travelled round the room and fell on a
back with a large sore patch running across the
small of it, or on a bucket of dirty slops with

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matches and cigarette-ends floating in it near a man
who was being tested for Bright's disease. I con-
fess I could not help laughing as some long string of
misery was ordered to prance on the floor, the doctor
bidding him, " Now swing your arms now rise on
your toes now hop." It was as though a company
of Spanish beggars had suddenly reverted to the
conditions of the Garden of Eden and had then
been bitten by the tarantula. How indignantly some
of them danced ! " You say you have a discharge
from the right ear ? " the doctor would say. Then
he would turn to one of the clerks and repeat to
him : " Discharge from the right ear." " Now cough,"
he would add, seizing the recruit by the crutch.
Once more, as I looked round, I thought of the men
who had been called up as cattle at a fair and of the
doctors as butchers and farmers going the rounds
and prodding the beasts with sticks, sizing up their
value as flesh.

My own turn came. A little doctor with a gentle
light on his face like a Christian's and a stethoscope
hanging round his neck like a scapulary called me
over. I had to write my name once or twice. He
asked me gently about my health. I ran down a
list of diseases, curable and incurable, with which
various doctors had strewed my path, dogmatically
contradicting one another. One of them, alas! was
written on me like a crooked note of exclamation.
The doctor examined my heart, my pulse, my
tongue. He made me do gymnastics for him. He
looked down my throat and said, " Pharyngitis."
As the clerk seemed to hesitate, he began to spell it:

"P h a r y ." He covered my right eye

with a piece of cardboard and made me read PENT
from a card hanging on the wall. He covered my
left eye and made me read O S Q D F. " Sight 66,"
he said to the clerk. He weighed me, he took my
height, he measured my chest when it was full and

WHITE CITIZENS

when it was empty. He asked me if I had ever had
rheumatic fever or a pain in my ears. He then
bade me wait while a deaf man was being examined
and, after him, a healthy-looking man who kept
putting a queer instrument up his nose.

I then had to go to another table where a sturdy,
cheerful doctor in khaki was sitting a whitening-
haired man in gold-rimmed glasses with a gift for
making diseased and naked persons smile as they
passed under his inquisition. His eyebrows rose as
he looked at my figure. " How did you come to get
like that?" he asked in amazement. I told him that
it was the result of an idle and misspent youth. "Are
you an Irishman ? " was his next question. I
admitted it. " Thy speech bewrayeth thee,'' he said.
He then examined my heart, and showed me so
much considerateness that I thought it must be very
seriously affected indeed. . .

Back at last to the dressing-room, where men
were asking each other, " Did they pass you ? " and
blaspheming. A long, black, consumptive Scotsman
was saying : " It's a bloody disgrace to call up a
man wi' lungs at all." Attendants began to wash
down Ihe hall with a hose, and the water crept in
along the floor of the dressing-room. We were
taken across the hall to another room and told to
sign our names in a book in order that we might be
given 2s. gd. I signed, but forgot the 2s. gd. A
Scottish soldier ran after me with it. " What do
you mean by leaving your money behind you ? " he
asked warmly. We were then taken to yet another
room and left at the door, while two aged men
crouched over a table within and wrote out rejection
certificates. At the end of half an hour or so my
turn to go in came. One of the clerks wrote out my
certificate, and another wrote the same details in a
book. It was apparently to be a certificate of identity
as well as of rejection. " Complexion fresh," they

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wrote down. " Eyes what colour are your eyes ? "
They asked me had I any scars or marks on my
body. I told them no, nothing but a mole or two.
" Moles will do," they said, " where are they ? " I
said that I really wasn't quite sure. I was almost
certain there was one on my right side, and I thought
though I wouldn't swear it there was one on my
left. They nodded as though to say that was enough,
and wrote down on my card, " Moles on right and
left flanks."

I had been at the White City since the morning.
When at last I escaped into the street it was close
upon half-past six. I felt that the certificate did not
exaggerate in describing me as " permanently and
totally disabled."

I suddenly remembered the two-and-ninepence.

I hailed a taxi and got into it, moles and all.

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ON BEING A WORKING MAN

Those who were most bitter against Mr. Lloyd
George when he preached at dukes and landlords
are applauding him most loudly now that he has
taken to preaching at working men. It is a common
belief that the working man exists to be preached at,
and the more the better. He is the anvil upon
which the hammer of rulers and masters needs to be
brought down at regular intervals with a noise. He
is the bottom dog, the black sheep, everything that
requires the strong hand. Like the black man in Mr.
Kipling's poem, he is half devil and half child. He
may be flattered so long as flattery will keep him
contented in his place; but when flattery proves un-
availing, he must be brought to heel with stern
words, and, if necessary, with sterner deeds. Canute
saw that those who urged him to utter his prohibi-
tion, " Thus far and no farther," to the incoming sea
were (in a phrase leader-writers love) knaves and
fools ; but the Canutes of these days are more self-
confident as they bid the tide of labour keep its
distance and not encroach too far on the fortunate
shore of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The truth
is, many people in the upper and middle classes
cannot cease regarding working people as members
of a subject race. They believe that working men
are doing their duty only when they are keeping
quiet. They hire an exceeding great number of
mouths and pens to preach to the workers the
doctrine of non-resistance. Every time the workers
resort even to passive resistance, it is not long till
they are painted as wickeder than the Huns on the
Strength of some isolated street incident. They are

ON BEING A WORKINGMAN

denounced as disloyal and by every other epithet
that can suggest that they are enemies of the State.
Luther told the German peasants when they rose in
rebellion : " They ought to suffer and be silent, if
they want to be Christians." That is a widely held
ideal of conduct for the working classes. It is not
preached by people who are Tolstoyans; it is
preached by men who hold that there is one morality
for those who rule, and another for those who serve.
That, I think, must be one of the trials of an intelli-
gent workingman's life. He is continually treated as
though he were a different kind of creature from
men who own land and money and shops.

It is, I admit, as easy to sentimentalise over the
working man as to abuse him. It is easy to see him
as a figure of tragic simplicity, something painted
by Millet or sculptured by Rodin, symbolizing not
merely the dignity but the divinity of labour. He
is in this view Atlas with the world on his shoulders.
He is the builder of cities, the harvester of vineyards,
the discoverer of bread. He towers above us like a
moral lesson rather than a man. He holds in his
hands all gifts, and statesmen and admirals and
millionaires are his pensioners. He seems perfec-
tion incarnate in his strength and endurance. He
has the air of a messenger from Heaven rather than
of the greasy outcast of the public-houses painted by
his enemies. This may be as false a view as the
other, but it is at least an invention ominous of a
more cheerful world, not a mere caricature scrawled
by hate. It emphasises the fact that the working
man is, above all, a sufferer ; he suffers in order that
others may have abundance. It may be argued that
he does not really suffer so acutely as those for whom
he suffers that his imagination is dull and his
sensibilities blunted. But is not this the supreme
suffering of all, this loss of the power to suffer ?
Who would exchange imagination for dullness

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ON BEING A WORKINGMAN

sensitiveness of body and soul for insensibility ? To
do so is to commit suicide ; it is to prefer to suffer
death rather than to suffer life. But as a matter of fact
the theory of the insensibility of the working classes
is so much nonsense. It may be that the average
working man is curiously insensitive before the
beauty of some blue-hooded Madonna of Titian's ;
but then so is the average peer and so is the average
manufacturer. It may be that use and necessity
have made him comparatively insensitive to the
ugliness of stale clothes and smelly bedrooms and
two-year-old whiskey. But he is sensitive like the
rest of us to cold and heat, to the difference between
a full belly and an empty one, to pain and pleasure,
to love and anger and hatred, to the difference
between living in a smaller room and living in a
larger one, between being bullied and being treated
like a reasonable creature, between a halfpenny
and a sovereign, between living in a pig-sty of
children and living in a clean and smiling
home, between a day at Brighton and a day on
the operation table, between looking forward to
a pension and looking forward to the workhouse,
between getting ill and getting well, between
living and dying. Assuredly, we must not get
into the habit of regarding the working man as a
person who may be knocked about, stuck with pins,
exposed to the elements, and generally neglected
without injury, like certain ugly-eyed dolls that
children love.

Those who regard the working man as a different
kind of being from themselves, however, seem to
think that the only way in which one can do him
serious damage is by allowing him to become better
off than he is at present. This attitude to the
working classes was clearly demonstrated the other
day in the West London police-court when the
magistrate, Mr. Fordham, lectured a soldier's wife

120

ON BEING A WORKINGMAN

who was accused of disorderly conduct. I have no
doubt from the evidence that the woman deserved a
lecture, but Mr. Fordham's lecture was exactly the
kind that ought not to have been delivered. " You
are," he told the unhappy woman, "getting much
too large an allowance an allowance which really
in itself drives you to drink and to squander money.
Probably if you had less money by way of allowance,
you would keep much more sober." If Mr. Fordham
regards it as his mission to preach gospel poverty
to mankind in general, his lecture is in a measure
justifiable. But if he does not, by what right does
he address his condescending middle-class morali-
sings to the poor instead of to peeresses and the
wives and daughters of millionaires ? Does he find
in the world about him that it is money which drives
people to drink ? Would he recommend a young
lady in his own class to refuse an inheritance on the
ground that it would bring with it temptations to
drunkenness ? Does he find that the more one's
salary increases the more one feels like squandering
it on alcohol ? He knows that it is not so. Riches are
no charm against drunkenness ; but it is not excess
of money, but excess of poverty, that in general
drives men and women to excess of drinking. It is
in the slums, not in the Bishop's palace or in the
country house or in the villa, that drunkenness is
most usual in these days. Mr. Fordham's lecture is
not based on facts but is merely an expression of
the middle-class suspicion of improvements in the
position of working people. Working men are not
admitted to have the right to improve their position
except by thrift. Do they ask for more money ?
They are denounced on the ground that, if they got
it, they would only drink it. Do they ask for more
leisure? They are denounced because, if they got it,
they would spend it in the public-houses. Do they
ask for more power? They are denounced for

121

ON BEING A WORKINGMAN

plotting death, disaster, and damnation against the
State. In a State which glories in competition they
are forbidden to compete except against each other ;
if they enter into the larger competition for the
country's wealth, they are accused of tyranny, red
ruin, and the breaking up of laws. They are the bad
boys of the family, whom it is always safe to blame.
Whenever any dispute arises between them and their
employers, they are almost invariably regarded as
the aggressors. The employer who insists that war
shall be the occasion of lower real wages and larger
profits is looked on as a sensible business man. The
worker who demands that during war-time his
children's stomachs shall be filled at least as usual
is browbeaten as a fellow who is disturbing national
unity and interfering with the supply of necessary
things to his brothers in the trenches. The employer
who strikes against giving his men an honest wage
is never painted in half so dark colours. And yet it
is his refusal to pay a fair wage that has again and
again in recent months held up the work of the war.
Not that the working man is a saint who never
errs. But consider his position. He has no security
in his work beyond the week frequently not beyond
the day. He lives at the whim of the employing
classes. He lives as it were at a week's notice. He
sees his children growing up about him, and he
knows that an accident may happen to him any day
as the result of which they will be left to the harsh
charity of the parish. He sees them growing up with
the gutter for their only garden, and he speculates
on the future of all that brightness and laughter
and its insecure tenure even of the gutter. He sees
them doomed to live almost for certain in the same
flowerless monotony in which he himself has always
lived. When they come into the house, he is like a
man fighting for air. They are all fighting for air.
They are overcrowded ; they cannot get away from

ON BEING A WORKINGMAN

each other; they get on each other's nerves. Hence
the furies of mean streets, the outbreaks of violence
and drunkenness. He attempts to bring some of the
beauty of the world into his home ; he has a caged
bird, a cat, a pot of geraniums. He has one or two
meanly showy glass ornaments on the mantelpiece,
such as he might win on a Bank holiday. Not that
his house is always as poor as this. People tell you
that the Yorkshire miner has often a piano in his
house; they tell you this with a smile, as much as to
say that a working man has really no right to have a
piano in his house. But his house is almost always
ugly. He is dumped, as it were, into a brickfield ;
he has no inheritance in the teeming earth. Where-
evcv he goes it is the same. He is herded into
cheap galleries in the theatres : he is pushed into
separate bars in the public-houses. He is a person
cut off, put in his place. He is an outsider, and his
children are outsiders, in a world of motor-cars and
rich dresses and gardens. He eats what the more
fastidious classes leave. He bets on horses that rich
men run. He, too, is caged-off, like his bird. . . .
And yet, paradoxically enough, he is cheerful rather
than bitter, and he faces death for his country in
great battles with music-hall jokes on his lips. He
enjoys the sight of kings and members of Parliament.
He enjoys eating and drinking and making love and
playing with his children. At least it is so in a
thousand thousand cases. He has reconciled him-
self to the little circle of his lot, and does not look
for pleasure beyond its circumference. . . .

Luckily, every now and then he becomes more
inquisitive and adventurous, and the circle is made
wider. He is then attacked on all sides as a tres-
passer, but he is really a far sounder patriot than
those who by withstanding him trespass upon the
rights of the coming race.

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THE BUSINESS-MAN

Those who are happiest over the change in the
Government are happy chiefly for two reasons. One
is that they have got new lawyers for old. The
other is that there has been an influx of business-
men into the new Ministry. For some years past
there has been a growing inclination to paint the
business-man in bright colours. He seems to stand
for everything that is practical in contrast to the
mess, muddle and make-believe which are supposed
to be the attendant circumstances of the labours of
most of the politicians.

When people talk of the business-man in politics,
they often give one the impression that they regard
all business-men as being of one type. It is as
though they believed there was no difference between
a cotton-manufacturer and an advertising-manager,
or between an advertising-manager and a shop-
keeper. They have an idea, apparently, that to
make money in any branch of manufacture, com-
merce or trade, is the mark of an all-round practical
man. Kings and landowners and clergymen, lawyers
and artists and men of science are, by comparison,
inhabitants of the moon. Now it can hardly be
doubted that the heads of great businesses like
Lord Rhondda nnd Sir Alfred Mond may perform
immense services to the State services as immense
as those performed by landowners and lawyers. But
this does not mean that the ordinary man who is
called a business-man has the right to regard the
genius for organization possessed by a Lord Rhondda
or a Sir Alfred Mond as a specific and common
faculty of the business world. A business-man

124

THE BUSINESS-MAN

either may be a great producer or he may be I use
the word in no disparaging sense a great " tout."
He may reveal a gift for increasing the productive
capacity of his firm or he may merely reveal a gift
for increasing orders for the goods of his firm. In
other words, his talent may be either the talent of
organization or the talent of persuasion. In the
latter case he may be worth a small fortune to a firm
of manufactures competing with other firms, but- he
may not be worth as much as an ordinary civil ser-
vant in the work of government. Persuasion is, no
doubt, an art required in politics and the civil
service as well as in business. But the plausibility
of the business-man is, I believe, crude and ineffec-
tive compared to the plausibility of lawyers and
University graduates.

As for those leaders of industry who do possess
the genius for organization, even they have seldom
the added genius for statesmanship. In these days,
when there is so much talk of national organization,
many people seem to regard statesmanship as a
problem in business organization and nothing more.
This is a mere confusion of terms. The State is a
household as well as a business, and, just as a
man who may be able to organize his business
into prosperity may be able to organize his
household into nothing but gloom, so there might
conceivably be a man who could organize a business
into success but could only organize a nation into
disaster. The problems of statesmanship call for
qualities of mind and (not in the mawkish sense)
sympathy such as the ordinary business-man has, in
his favourite phrase, " no use for." The statesman
is not permitted to shape events towards the single
end of making profit for himself and a number of
shareholders within the four corners of the law. He
is required to be as disinterested in his leadership as
the business-man is bound by force of circumstance

"5

THE BUSINESS-MAN

to be " interested." He may be, up to a point and
quite a considerable point ambitious and fond of
his salary, but his service of the State does not
involve profiteering as does the business magnate's
service of his firm. The business magnate is the
head of a nation within a nation, and his loyalty is,
though not necessarily to a dangerous extent, divided.
He is impatient of laws which restrict his liberty to
do as he likes in his sub-nation. He fought as
bitterly as the Stuarts in order to establish his divine
right to absolute power. The nineteenth century
was spent in limiting the powers of business-men as
the seventeenth was spent in limiting the powers of
kings. The business-men were indignant when it
was suggested that the workers had a right to
organize themselves into unions in order to obtain
better conditions of labour. They were amazed
when they were denied the right to make use of the
services of as many children as could be tempted
it was usually the parents rather than the children
who were tempted into their factories by a tiny
wage. Many of them were genuinely shocked when
the proper sanitation of their factories was declared
to be a matter not of private but of public interest.
Not that there have not always been men of high
ideals in business. But the average business point
of view has, as a rule, been selfish and anti-social.
Its gospel has been a gospel of gain, not of the
increase of human culture and human happiness.
There is probably a greater proportion of business-
men to-day whose ideals rise above this penny
wisdom than there has ever been in history, but the
organization of gain is still with the bulk of them
the golden rule of life. There is fortunately only
one great business in England which has frankly
taken for its motto, " Our trade our politics," but
the interference of the business-man in politics for
private ends is not unknown in other trades also.

126

THE BUSINESS-MAN

And the experience of some other countries in this
respect has been much worse. It may be retorted
that the landowners have gone in for the politics of
their property quite as much as the business-men,
and it cannot be denied that every class is inclined
to legislate for itself under the pretence that to
legislate for so admirable a class is to legislate for
the nation. That, indeed, is one of the temptations
of human nature which is well-nigh irresistible. If
there were any danger of the public making a fetish
of government by landowners, one would at once
emphasise the dangers involved in such a system.
But, as it is government by business-men which
happens just now to be in the air, one is forced to
consider the qualifications of the business-man for
such work.

The business-man of the better sort would, I
think, be among the first to admit the shortcomings
of business-men as a class. He would admit that,
outside their ordinary sphere, many of the ablest
of them are extremely ignorant men men of
grotesquely narrow vision. The land-owning classes
have at least been brought up in the tradition that
they are the governing classes, and, though from the
point of view of a Matthew Arnold they may be
" barbarians," they at least breathe to some extent
the atmosphere of the large world. They include a
considerable proportion of men the interest of whose
lives is problems of government, problems of foreign
affairs, problems of this or that sort of national
service. I have no wish to see government by the
aristocratic classes revived as a political ideal, but,
badly as they have governed the world in the past,
it is only fair to credit them with having produced
a great number of men of what is called public
spirit. This tradition of public spirit has been strong
especially in politics, diplomacy, armies and navies.
Though it has again and again been tempered

127

THE BUSINESS-MAN

by the desire to find jobs for relations, and has been
accompanied by a narrow view of the welfare of the
State, it has seldom been quite extinguished by the
spirit of profiteering. The record of the business-men
who have so far entered politics is also creditable
enough, but there is no doubt that the obsession
of profiteering is stronger in business-men as a class
than in other classes. It may be thought that, this
being so, the introduction of the business-man into
government will mean that he will begin to make
profits for the State instead of making profits for a
firm. There is an idea abroad that the efficiency of
business-houses is vastly superior to the efficiency of
Government departments. This is open to question.
For one thing, the profit aimed at in public depart-
ments is very different from the profit of dividends.
It is, or should be, the profit of the citizens, not the
immediate profits of pockets. Public bodies are
concerned with providing citizens with good schools
and roads and bridges, rather than with schools,
roads and bridges that, in the business-man's use of
the word, " pay." Every public department should,
admittedly, be run on business-like lines but not
for business ends. Hence it is difficult to compare
the efficiency of a public department with that of a
business firm.

No outsider gets to know, for instance, of the
blunders of a business firm until it is threatened
with bankruptcy. Yet an honest business-man will
confess that he is as liable to make mistakes as any
Prime Minister or Foreign Secretary who ever lived.
The business-man does not live in the glare of news-
paper criticism. So long as dividends remain high,
he is immune from criticism. No statesman not
even the greatest in history ever enjoyed such
immunity. His very successes are frequently assailed
by his enemies as failures. He is pronounced a fool
even before he has been given a chance. The

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THE BUSINESS-MAN

business-man, being permitted to make his ordinary
day-to-day blunders in secret, preserves his reputa-
tion as an infallible and practical man. I remember
hearing the head of a great firm saying, at a time
when Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister, that if
the things that happened in his office were sub-
jected to the same censorious scrutiny as the things
that happen in Cabinets and Government depart-
ments, the general public would conclude that his
business was doomed to failure. He still " carries
on," however.

In spite of all that can be said in criticism of
the business-man, his presence in politics should be
no less welcome than that of the landlord, the
lawyer, the economist, and the working-man. One
protests only against his canonization as a national
redeemer. Political ideals and business ideals are
not necessarily identical, but for business methods
there is always need. At the same time, it is the
statesmen rather than the business-men who have
made such a success (from one point of view) of
national organization in Germany. The business-
man has helped, but the inspiring ideas were the
ideas of politicians. After all, the business of
government is the most difficult business in the
world, and there is no reason to think that an
ordinary business-man would succeed in it any
more than he would succeed in the business of
painting a picture or writing a play.

129 K

HORRORS OF WAR

At regular intervals during a great war the
question arises as to how much the general public
should be told about its horrors. The question has
been raised with reference to the cinematograph
pictures of the Battle of the Somme. One may put
aside at the outset the objection that the cinemato-
graph cheapens great events, which it records, as it
were, by accident and as a privileged spy. That is
not the point at issue. The argument against
exhibiting to the public the horrors of war is usually
based on the feeling that to dwell upon such things
is to lacerate unnecessarily the hearts of those whose
near relations either are facing death or have already
fallen in the field. And there is a selfish as well as
a generous instinct which urges people to keep silent
about the horrors of war. Those who stay at home,
or many of them, like to wrap themselves up in a
delusion that in making war they are sending forth
men upon a romance. In reading about the war,
they hug every comic anecdote and Academy pret-
tiness to their breasts as though these things restored
their confidence in the world. War, they seem to be
telling themselves, would not be so bad if it were not
for German atrocities. I imagine, however, the pro-
portion of people who take this comfortable view is
smaller, immensely smaller, than it has ever been
before. It is difficult to believe that by this time
there is a single person in the civilized world who
has not a friend or two fighting. Every day
hundreds of new houses go into mourning. One can
scarcely find a street in which some house has not
lost its heir through a bursting shell or a sniper's

130

HORRORS OF WAR

bullet. One looks at the windows of the poor, and
one sees an increasing number of the bemedalled
cards which a few months ago were stuck there with
such pride now fitted with a mourning bow. Thus,
in order to escape the realities of war, one would
need to be a hermit, or at least to live in the cell of
one's own selfishness.

Why, then, it may be asked, add the realization of
horrors to the already overwhelming realization of
personal loss ? And obviously one would not go to
a woman who had lost her son and describe to her
in detail his wounds, and the agonies in which he
died. One would like her to remain, almost at any
cost, under the impression that he was one of the
multitude who met their deaths swiftly and merci-
fully in the insane ecstasy of a charge. Supposing
he died horribly, one would not for the world add
his pain to hers. But this does not apply to the
general realization of horrors. The civilian world has
no right to benefit by the sufferings of others which
it is not willing to face in their innumerable tragedy.
No man has the right, by the proxy of a roomful of
statesmen, to send men to death and suffering for
his ideals without knowing exactly what he is doing.
If men could persuade themselves that war was
simply a " great game," they would be at war most
of the time they could afford from the business of
earning a living. It is a growing realization of the
appallingness of war that has made civilized nations
more and more come to regard it not as the first
resort, but as the last resort in a dispute between
rational beings. It was a revival of the war-cult of
earlier ages that precipitated Germany into the pre-
sent war. The German people as a whole, I imagine,
could have been led still more enthusiastically into
peace than into war. But their military leaders
longed to use their beautiful regiments and their
beautiful guns. They felt the passion of the game

HORRORS OF WAR

the desire to live the " lordliest life " at its fullest
and most thrilling. The fact that a number of
powerful men regarded war as something other than
a last resort has turned Europe into one vast house
of lunacy and slaughter. And yet the realistic as
opposed to the romantic view of war was common
enough in recent years in Germany itself. One
remembers a book called The Slaughterhouse, which
was published in Germany a few years ago with the
object of portraying war as a disgusting and frenzied
butchery. Books of this kind, indeed, were fairly
common in all countries. There was a Swede who
wrote a remarkable volume of stories called Pride
of War, in which he drew a horrid picture of events
in the Italian War in Tripoli. One of his stories
pictured a bayonet-charge in all its blood-lust and
drunken fury and hideous messiness, and then
suddenly showed us the soldiers who had taken part
in it studying with appreciative acceptance the
drawings in the illustrated papers which represented
the charge as a romantic rush of soldiers in spotless
uniforms to the glories of victory. One wonders
how many soldiers could endure a Christmas-
supplement treatment of the present war. So great
is the human need for illusion that, no doubt, there
are scores of thousands. But there are hundreds
of thousands whom such make-believe caricatures
would inflame with indignation. They know, and
they will not forget. At the same time, many of the
most popular books about the war are so reticent as
regards horrors that the civilian is in danger of
feeling almost too comfortable. One does not grudge
him his comfort frequently one shares it but
obviously the more he can be horrified into giving
his attention to the necessity of discovering some
saner means than war for arranging international
disputes, the better. The world must not be allowed
to drift into the slaughterhouse again, if any way of

132

HORRORS OF WAR

preventing it can be discovered. Whether war will
ever absolutely cease on this planet, no one knows.
But at least we can reduce its possibilities to a mini-
mum by merely willing to do so, and by directing
the intelligence of the world to that end. Some
authors call this direction of will and intelligence the
" cultivation of the international mind." There
could be no better education of this mind than the
realization of what war is actually like how it far
surpasses in horror a state of the world in which a
Titanic or a Lusitania would go down in disaster on
every day in the year. Some people may be alarmed
lest a too acute realization of horrors may weaken
the will to go on with a necessary war. But as a
matter of fact this is not the effect of the realization
of horrors on those who enter upon war as the only
method available to them of defending a just cause.
There will always be something in the human race
which will be willing to face death and the intensest
horrors if there is no other road to the victory of
their ideal. The realization of horrors by the way
will not enfeeble the spirit of men advancing towards
great ends. Those ends must be reached so they
will hold whatever the suffering. But is there no
other road ?

Hitherto, those who have dwelt upon the horrors
of war have often been ready to adopt a policy of
peace at any price. There is something ignoble in
a nature which avoids war merely in order to escape
the horrors of war. St. George might as honourably
have run away from the dragon through hatred of
its hideousness. What is needed is not a world in
which men will run away from dragons, but a world
in which men will see that dragons are not the
indispensable arbiters in every human dispute. We
need the will to exterminate the dragon, not to bolt
from him. Sydney Smith, who was one of the most
outspoken haters of war in nineteenth-century

133

HORRORS OF WAR

England, holds our sympathy so long as he protests
against the appeal to this bloody judge in human
affairs, when a more rational judge might be had ;
but he is in conflict with much that is fine in human
nature when he denounces the chivalrous side of war
with the criminal. There was nothing to appeal to
the imagination of ardent men when in 1823 he
wrote tremblingly of the prospect that England
would enter upon a war for the sake of the liberties
of Spain. " I am afraid," he wrote :

" I am afraid we shall go to war; I am sorry for
it. I see every day in the world a thousand acts
of oppression which I should like to resent, but I
cannot afford to play the Quixote. Why are the
English to be the sole vindicators of the human
race ? "

And he wrote again on the same subject :

" For God's sake, do not drag me into another
war ! I am worn down, and worn out, with
crusading and defending Europe, and protecting
mankind; I must think a little of myself. I am
sorry for the Spaniards I am sorry for the Greeks
I deplore the fate of the Jews; the people of the
Sandwich Islands are groaning under the most
detestable tyranny ; Bagdad is oppressed I do
not like the present state of the Delta Thibet is
not comfortable. Am I to fight for all these people ?
The world is bursting with sin and sorrow. Am I
to be champion of the Decalogue, and to be eter-
nally raising fleets and armies to make all men
good and happy ? We have just done saving
Europe, and I am afraid the consequence will be,
that we shall cut each other's throats."

All this seems to be the most unaspiring of common

134

HORRORS OF WAR

sense to the Quixote that survives in every man's
bosom. It is simply a bourgeois cry for comfortable
things. One knows how humane a man Sydney
Smith in fact was, but he has not expressed his anti-
militarism here as a fine humane ideal. He missed
all the heroic side of war when he accused mankind
of " hailing official murderers, in scarlet, gold and
cocks' feathers, as the greatest and most glorious
of human creatures." He who cannot praise the
heroism of war has no right to denounce the horrors
of war. Mr. Masefield's picture of the horrors of
war in his new book, Gallipoli, is all the more con-
vincing because of the imaginative enthusiasm with
which he reveals the hero in man triumphing amid
the horrors. His soldier is a heroic challenger of all
the fiends as well as a tragic figure who sees the
comrades at his side

"blown to pieces . . . or dismembered, or drowned,
or driven mad, or stalked, or sniped by some unseen
stalker, or bombed in the dark sap with a handful
of dynamite in a beef-tin, till their blood is caked
upon his clothes and thick upon his face,"

and who himself in a few minutes more may be

"blasted dead, or lying bleeding in the scrub, with
perhaps his face gone and a leg and an arm broken,
unable to move but still alive, unable to drive away
the flies or screen the ever-dropping rain, in a place
where none will find him, or be able to help him ;
in a place where he will die and rot and shrivel,
till nothing is left of him but a few rags and a few
remnants and a little identification disc flapping on
his bones in the wind."

Soldiers have to learn to see a light side to this
universal chaos of calamities. But civilians ought

135

HORRORS OF WAR

not to be permitted to do so. There is a scene in a
revue now running in a London music-hall in which
huge bombs fall comically in German trenches. It
is a legitimate amusement for soldiers, but hardly
one feels for those who stay at home. Those who
stay at home are constantly in danger of beginning
to take rhings for granted; and it is too easy to allow
oneself to take other people's sufferings for granted.
Catholics feel this to such a degree that they make
statues and pictures of Christ, which reveal the
wounds of the crucifixion, and show the bleeding
heart in his breast. These statues offend the non-
Catholic as morbid and repulsive things, but one
sees clearly enough the object of religious men and
women in dwelling upon such horrors. It is simply
to compel themselves to realize the sufferings which
were endured, according to their belief, as a necessary
means to their salvation. And we, too, must not
allow ourselves to forget those nearer sufferings. If
we forget them, then the war becomes but a Bacchic
interlude in a complacent and drifting world. It
will be only a meaningless dingdong of massacre
instead of the introduction, as it may be made, to a
new Europe. And our grandchildren will say that
it had no more moral significance than old Kaspar
could discover in the Battle of Blenheim. Popular
historians, no doubt, will hurrah a great deal and
heap up rhetorical mountains of words about the
" deeds that saved the Empire," but the war will
have failed to contribute anything to the service of
mankind.

136

T. M. KETTLE

Tom Kettle has been killed in Flanders Tom
Kettle, the most brilliant Irishman of his generation,
the generation after Mr. Yeats and A. E. He was
brilliant in conversation, brilliant in public speech,
brilliant in the written phrase. To be in his com-
pany was to be in the company of the most melan-
choly man of his years in Ireland, and the wittiest.
He was by nature of the school of the pessimists.
He found a kind of intellectual mirror in Anatole
France. But he could not achieve consolation, like
Anatole France, through wit and Rabelaisianism.
He was too tragical-hearted for that. One thought
of him as a young philosopher in a sad cloak. I
once saw a pen-and-ink drawing of James Clarence
Mangan that had strange resemblances to Kettle.
He seemed in the same way to go about visibly
accompanied by doom. His conversation at times
was like a comment on doom, scornful, cheerful,
challenging, paradoxical emotion turned back from
the abyss with an epigram.

Those who know nothing of Ireland will regard it
as a paradox that one of the first public acts of
Kettle's life was to organize a body of students to
capture the Royal University organ in Dublin, and
so prevent " God Save the King " from being played
at the conferring of degrees, while his last act has
been to die for the liberties of Europe in the uniform
of the British Army. But to Kettle himself there
was no contradiction in this. " God Save the King "
has been sung in Ireland fora century, not as a song
of freedom, but as a hymn of hate against liberty.

137

T. M. KETTLE:

Kettle saw in the German outrage on Belgium
simply a new geographication of the curse of Crom-
well. I remember the mood in which he came back
from Belgium, where the outbreak of war had found
him engaged in buying rifles for the National Volun-
teers. He was horrified by the spectacle of a bully
let loose on a little nation. He was horrified, too,
by the philosophic lie at the back of all this greed
of territory and power. He was horrified at seeing
the Europe he loved going down into brawling and
bloody ruin. Not least and no one can understand
contemporary Ireland who does not realize this
was he horrified by the thought that, if Germany
won, Belgium would become what he had mourned
in Ireland, a nation in chains.

That was the mood in which he offered his
services to the War Office. He always dreamed of
an Ireland whose life would be identified with the
life of Europe. He believed that in fighting for the
soul of Europe he was fighting for the soul of Ireland.
He hated any nationalism which had not interna-
tionalism for its complement. In his most character-
istic book, " The Day's Burden " the very title of
the book seems like a piece of autobiography he
expressed his longing for an Irish Goethe who would
teach Ireland " that while a strong people has its
own self for centre, it has the universe for circum-
ference." He believed in Nationalism because " in
gaining her own soul, Ireland will gain the whole
world." The last time I saw him it was in Dublin
ast July he was philosophizing after his manner on
the " coloured rags " for which men lay the world
waste. He was a Nationalist, not through love of a
flag, but through love of freedom. He would have
pulled down all barriers against human sympathies.
He despised Jingoism and narrowness on all sides.
One remembers his contemptuous summary of Mr.
Kipling's Ulster poem as :

138

T. M. KETTLE

" A bucketful of Boyne
To put the sunrise out."

His attitude with regard to the Dublin insur-
rection in Easter Week was typical of the conflict
of his sympathies, as of the sympathies of many Irish
soldiers during the last few months. He was aghast
at the insurrection : he fought in the streets of
Dublin to suppress it. But he was equally aghast
at the manner of its suppression and the execution
of the leaders of the revolt. Events seemed to have
overwhelmed him with despair. The murder of
Sheehy-Skeffington, whose brother-in-law he was,
had especially sunk into his soul as a monstrous
and incredible cruelty. He had often differed from
Skeffington, who always marched straight for one
goal, while he himself, being less of a man of action
by temperament, meditated upon goals rather than
marched to them ; but he loved him for the uncom-
promising and radically gentle idealist he was. He
seemed, as he talked, like the spirit of pity incarnate
some shadow born out of the imagination of
Turgenev or Thomas Hardy. He spoke at one
moment with indignation and mockery of those
whom he had fought as enemies, and the next with a
curious envious reverence of men who had died with
so unflinching a heroism. He was bitter that they
had murdered his dream of an Ireland peopled, not
only by good Irishmen, but by good Europeans ;
but of one of the insurgent leaders, whom we both
knew and loved, he said : " I would gladly have given
my life for him."

Some day, perhaps, a great artist will arise who
will be able to portray the passions and sufferings
of Ireland in the year 1916. If he does he will find
in Kettle a representative figure an exaggeratedly
representative figure of much of the suffering
of the time. And how attractive and wayward

139

T. M. KETTLE

and crusading a figure, too ! Wit, metaphysi-
cian, economist, politician, professor, Bohemian, he
was, indeed, as he called Anatole France, a soldier
of " the lost cause of intellect." It was to the
standard of the intellect in a gloomy world that he
always gaily rallied. His darting phrases made
straight for the heart of unintelligence sometimes,
also, no doubt, for the heart of intelligence. The
truth is, he never could resist a good phrase. When
he sat in Parliament, he summed up the frailty of
Mr. Balfour in yielding to the Tariff Reformers in
the sentence : " They have nailed their leader to
the mast." And his conversation was a procession
of such things uttered from a large melancholy
mouth with no more than the flutter of a smile.
And now he is dead, a soldier in the lost cause of
the intellect in national and international affairs.
Perhaps, as a result of his death, his ideas will begin
to live the root ideas, I mean, apart from their
accidental application his ideas, especially, of a
new Ireland in a new Europe, of peace and humanity
and honour.

But meanwhile consider the tragedy of it all.
Sheehy-Skeffington is shot by British soldiers at
the command of a mad officer in April : Tom Kettle
dies at the hands of German soldiers five months
later. There you have more than a personal tragedy.
You have a last symbolical act in the age-long tragedy
of Ireland.

140

SHEEHY-SKEFFINGTON

Sheehy-Skeffington's death at the hands of soldiers
in the Dublin rising stirs the imagination all the
more profoundly because not merely was he innocent
of any crime, but he seemed to be almost the only
person left in Ireland who was an irreconcilable
believer in peace. Ireland has in the last year or
two been occupied by five bodies of armed men
the British Army, the National Volunteers, the Irish
Volunteers, the Ulster Volunteers, and the Irish
Citizen Army. Skeffington stood aloof from them
all. He believed furiously in the ideals of some of
them, and disbelieved furiously in the ideals of others.
But he objected equally to the methods of all.
Some months before his death he moved at a meet-
ing of extreme Nationalists a resolution calling for
an immediate end to the European war. But the
meeting threw out his resolution and passed another
instead, to the effect that the war must go on till
the liberty of Ireland was assured. Skeffington was
constantly in a minority of one even in the house of
his friends.

I first heard of Sheehy-Skeffington, I think, when
he was running a weekly called The National Democrat.
If I remember right, it was edited by him and
Fred Ryan (who afterwards went to Cairo to
work on an Egyptian Nationalist paper, and was
editing Egypt in London when he died in 1913).
Skeffington and Ryan were exceptional figures in
the ranks of Irish Nationalism. They were Socialists,
Suffragists, anti-clericals, and many other things that
the average Nationalist is not. They had something
of the Frenchman's eager scepticism and desire to see

141

SHEEHY-SKEFFINGTON

things in the light of reason. Fred Ryan's heroes
lay among the French philosophers of the eighteenth
century. Skeffington's inspiring hero was nearer
home. It was Michael Davitt. I do not mean that
he was a blind follower of Davitt's. Davitt had
been a Fenian, and Skeffington was not that. But
Davitt may be said to have been the first democrat
in Parnellite Ireland. He believed in the cause of the
working classes, the nationalization of the land, and
in lay control of the schools. Skeffington's politics
lay beyond this, but this was their foundation. His
enthusiasm resulted in his writing a polemical life
of Davitt, in which he accepted and emphasized
Davitt's hostile characterization of Parnell.

Skeffington did not in those days belong to the
extreme section of the Nationalists. He was a
member of the United Irish League a most unwel-
come member at times, when he filled the part of
the Socratic gadfly. Orthodox members of all
leagues have a way of passing resolutions and then
going asleep for the rest of the year. Skeffington's
resolutions all had the object of waking people up.
He did not believe in tact or compromise. He
believed in fighting for principles. And he was
always doing it. Politicians, whose business is with
programmes rather than with principles, were
impatient of so unrestrained an interloper. As a
result, Skeffington was constantly at odds with the
majority. He became a sort of legend as an inter-
rupter of the somnolent. One thought of his red
beard as a storm-signal, and of his long knicker-
bockers as an assertion of principle at all times and
in all places. Every orthodoxy in Dublin regarded
him as an eccentric. He was the leader of an even
smaller party than Mr. Tim Healy. No jeers or
sneers, however, could silence him. He seemed to
thrive on them. He was as irrepressible as the pre-
war Gustave HervS or the later Liebknecht. He

142

SHEEHY-SKEFFINGTON

was Daniel in the lion's den, enjoying the humours
of his position. Ultimately, even his enemies had
to admit that, eccentric though he might seem, he
was of courage unexcelled. He never refused a
fight.

What astonished many people was the splendid
ease with which he laid aside the bitterness of con-
troversy in his private relations. Reading his articles
one would sometimes think of him as a controver-
sialist, violent, rasping, unsympathetic. When one
met him, however, one discovered him to be above
all things cheerful, tolerant and sociable. He would
joke about his misadventures and the derisive abuse
which was occasionally heaped upon him. He could
converse without malice with his worst enemy. He
enjoyed scoring points in his rather high voice and
his Ulsterish accent; but he was incessantly amiable
as he did so. His voice might be sharp, but his
quick eyes were gay and unexpectedly gentle. He
enjoyed argument, one felt, like a game of reason.
He enjoyed hearing the other side as well as fighting
for his own. His ability to appreciate other people's
points-of-view was shown in a series of dialogues
which he wrote about ten years ago and published
week by week in Mr. W. P. Ryan's paper, The Irish
Peasant. He called his series " Dialogues of the
Day," and discussed in them topics of the hour from
the points-of-view of United Irish Leaguers, Sinn
Feiners, Ulstermen, priests, business men and other
types of Irishmen. They were both amusing and
impartial. Skeffington, indeed, was a very clever as
well as a very honest journalist.

Of late years he was associated chiefly with the
labour movement, the suffrage movement and the
anti-war movement. He worked hard for justice to
the poor during the great Larkin strikes which pre-
ceded the war. He fought equally hard in the mili-
tant Suffragist movement, pacifist though he was,

143

SHEEHY-SKEFFINGTON

but it was obviously the self-sacrifice rather than the
violence of the movement which attracted him.

One might have expected that so militant a per-
sonality would throw himself with enthusiasm into
the National Volunteer movement, which grew up
in Ireland as a counterblast to Sir Edward Carson.
And there is no doubt that Skeffington was strongly
attracted to the Volunteers. He loved them for their
honesty, their self-sacrifice, their idealism. But his
belief that the problems of the world should be
settled, not by bloodshed, but by reason, prevented
him from going all the way with them, and in The
Irish Citizen he published a protest against the
theory of raising an Irish Nationalist army, in the
form of an " open letter " to his friend Thomas
MacDonagh, afterwards executed for his share in the
rising. In the course of this open letter, Skeffington
wrote :

"You will say Ireland is too small, too poor,
ever to be a militarist nation in the European
sense. True, Ireland's militarism can never be on
so grand a scale as that of Germany or England ;
but it may be equally fatal to the best interests of
Ireland. European militarism has drenched
Europe in blood; Irish militarism may only
crimson the fields of Ireland. For us that would
be disaster enough."

He then went on to suggest, as an alternative to
the preparation of an armed body of Nationalists,

an organization of people prepared to dare all
things for their object, prepared to suffer and to
die rather than abandon one jot of their principles,
but an organization that will not lay it down as
its fundamental principle. ' We will prepare to
kill our fellow men.' "

144

SHEEHY-SKEFFINGTON

And now the poet of the sword and the journalist
of peace, both of them men of genial light-hearted-
ness, lie in an equal grave with bullet-wounds in
their breasts.

Skeffington's pacifism was double-edged. It was
the pacifism of the Nationalist and the pacifism of the
Internationalist. If he had been a German or an
Englishman he would, no doubt, have been a con-
scientious objector. Being an Irishman, who took
the view that this is not Ireland's war, he was also
an anti-recruiting propagandist. He believed that
Ireland as a nation has the same right to remain
neutral in this war as Denmark has ; and he argued
his case on comparable grounds to those on which
M. Henri Bourassa, the Canadian Nationalist,
claimed that Canada ought to remain neutral. In
the first half of 1915 he got into trouble on account
of his anti-recruiting speeches, and was sent to prison.
He refused to take food, however, and as soon as
he was exhausted by a hunger-strike the authorities
let him go. Unfortunately the hunger-strike affected
his heart, and he was ill for some time after his
release. He afterwards went to America, where he
explained that he and those who agreed with him
were not pro-German but merely desired that Ireland
should remain neutral in the war. The pro-
Germans in America were indignant at his sugges-
tion that pro-Germanism was a rarity in Ireland.

Skeffington, however, was intellectually a pacifist
as well as a neutralist. His interests were social-
democratic and internationalist. He would certainly
have stood by the side of Liebknecht if he had been
a German. He hated Imperialist wars as denials
of the brotherhood of man.

In writing of Sheehy-Skefnngton I am naturally
concerned with expounding his ideas (in so far as I
understand them) and not my own. I differed from
him on the subject of the present war as on many

145 L

SHEEHY-SKEFFINGTON

other subjects. But however much one differed
from him, one could still watch his fighting and
heretical progress with immense admiration for his
devotion and courage. He was a " bonnie fighter."
He was besides, I think, the honestest man in Ireland.
How generous was the spirit in which, in those days
of insurrection, the police having been withdrawn
from the streets of Dublin, he set out for the danger-
zone to remind the poor and the starved of their
duties of citizenship ! That lonely mission to put
down looting in the streets was a worthy last act in
a life devoted to noble causes. " You will find out
your mistake afterwards," he said to the soldiers
who were about to shoot him ; and having said so
he died smiling. Ireland, and the world, could ill
afford to lose so good a citizen so daring, so
energetic, so challenging, so individual. Probably
he would never have been the leader of a large party
in Irish politics however long he had lived. But as
a guerilla critic in advance of his age, he would have
been of infinite service in a self-governing Ireland.
He was less a dreamer than a propagandist. But
every humanitarian cause in Ireland, while gaining
an example, has lost a heroic champion through his
death.

146

ON NATIONALISM AND
NATIONALITY

The idea of Nationalism is generally misunder-
stood. The Imperialists do not try to understand
it ; they call it sedition and hand it over to the
police. Unfortunately, a great number of good
democrats Socialists and humanitarians especially
are also hostile to the national idea. They regard
it as an aggressive denial of the brotherhood of man,
a shrill and immoral exaggeration of individualism.
Perhaps this is because Nationalism means so many
different things in different countries. In Russia,
for instance, Nationalism has come (or had, in the
Tsar's time) to mean Chauvinism the very reverse
of the real meaning of the word. Nationalists of
the Russian sort are essentially Imperialists or
Supernationalists perverters of the decent things
in patriotism. You may always take it that a
Nationalist who shows signs of Chauvinism is an
Imperialist in the making. By his Chauvinism he
has already betrayed the central principle of
Nationalism, which is to respect the personality of
every other nation as one wishes the personality of
one's own nation to be respected. Therefore,, when
one speaks of Nationalism as a political theory and
not as a catchword of party politics, one j.s thinking
of Nationalism like Mazzini's the. Nationalism
which urges countries like Finland, 'Persia, India,,
Poland, Egypt, Georgia, and Ireland to strive, not
for mastery over other nations, but for an e^ual
place in an international brotherhood of peoples.

147

ON NATIONALISM AND NATIONALITY

Nationalism, then, is a theory concerning the
personality of nations. Nationality, said Mazzini,
is the individuality of peoples, and Nationalism is
simply an assertion of the belief that the individuality
of a people is as holy and real and desirable a thing
as the individuality of a man or a woman. It holds
up the ideal of a many-coloured cosmopolitanism of
free nations as opposed to a colourless and mech-
anical cosmopolitanism of big Powers and subject
races. The most cosmopolitan of creeds, it is
eternally opposed to the pseudo-cosmopolitanism
which means denationalisation the sort of cosmop-
olitanism which is referred to in a famous passage in
" Rudin," where Turgenev, speaking through one of
his characters, says : " Cosmopolitanism is all
twaddle, the cosmopolitan is a nonentity worse
than a nonentity : without nationality is no art, nor
truth, nor life, nor anything. You cannot even have
an ideal face without individual expression : only a
vulgar face can be devoid of it.'' In the eyes of
Nationalists, Imperialism makes for the vulgariza-
tion, the spiritual lifelessness, of the world.
Nationalism, on the other hand, aims at opening up
a way by which the nations may have life, and have
it more abundantly.

It might be possible to admit a good deal of this
without understanding in all cases how the Nation-
alist theory is to be put into practice. Some people
seem to find it difficult to tell a nation when they
see one. They do not know whether Georgia is a
nation or only part of Russia, whether Ireland is a
nation or only a province of what the lawyers call
the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
If Ireland is a nation, they say, for example, then
why not Yorkshire ? Is the individuality of Ireland
any more marked than the individuality of Yorkshire ?
These are fair questions. The answer to them is
that Yorkshire will be a nation on the same day on

148

ON NATIONALISM AND NATIONALITY

which she feels that she is one, and on which her
consciousness becomes so separate from the national
consciousness of England that she will desire to
express it in a distinct literature, language, social
and political life, and all the rest of it. Ireland
simply has a different national consciousness from
England. Her very dissensions which she herself
finds so interesting only bore England. Even the
dullest person can see that she has a distinct person-
ality of her own to the making of which thousands
of years have contributed years of social and
political change, of geographic separateness, of sun
and wind and rain falling upon green growing
things thousands of years of the spirit of place
working among men and women and creating an
inheritance of personality and sentiment for the
children of even the latest comers to the land.

Take the case of India again. Imperialists tell
us of India, as Metternich used to say of Italy, that
it is a mere "geographical expression." Thousands
of authentic Indian voices, on the other hand, rise
in every corner of the country to call India their
motherland in other words, to prove in the most
effectual way possible that India is a unit of
national consciousness. Indian Nationalism is an
obvious fact to everybody except the people who
think they can explain away all the great events
since the Flood by saying that they are the work
of paid agitators; and the reality of Indian Nation-
alism is sufficient proof of the reality of the Indian
nation. It is, of course, part of an unscrupulous
Imperialist policy to deny the Indian nation to say
to the Indians, " You are divided into Hindu and
Mahometan, into Mahratta and Punjaubee, into all
sorts of races and religions. It is your want of
unity which compels England to go in and man-
age your affairs for you. You would only quarrel
and kill each other if you were left to yourselves."

149

ON NATIONALISM AND NATIONALITY

One would set more store by the conclusion of
the Imperialist if one did not know that with him
the wish is here father to the thought. " Divide
that you may govern," is an old settled principle of
Imperial policy, and subject peoples are kept subject
only by a constant excitement of all their worst
passions in a way that recalls the degradation, with-
out the heroism, of civil war. " But the worst of
this is," said Archbishop Boulter, Primate of Ireland,
when oppression was drawing Irishmen together in
the eighteenth century, "that it tends to unite
Protestant with Papist, and whenever that happens
good-bye to the English interest in Ireland for
ever." In other words, in order to further an
Imperial policy, Ireland was to be kept, like India,
"a geographical expression," a scene of civil hatreds,
and to be prevented by hook or by crook from
becoming a nation, in which men of opposite creeds
would agree to differ and would collaborate on com-
mon days in striving for the welfare of their country.
Imperialism is surely the meanest and most dis-
honourable creed that ever deluded thousands of
decent men and women.

One may meet the Imperialist half-way, however,
and admit to some extent the " geographical expres-
sion " argument. Grant, for instance, that Italy
was once a " geographical expression." The ques-
tion that immediately arises is : " Does the Imper-
ialist hold it would have been better for Italy to
have remained so and never to have awakened into
nationhood ? " If he thinks that it is better to be
a geographical expression than a free nation, why
does he (supposing, for instance, he is an English-
man) recoil from the thought of the subjection of
England to some foreign Power? And, if it is
better to be a nation than a geographical expression,
then surely he is bound to aid Poland, India, Persia,
Egypt, Ireland, and all other trammelled peoples,

150

ON NATIONALISM AND NATIONALITY

as far as in him lies, in their struggle for a place
among the free nations. Every nation begins by
being a geographical expression. Nationalism is
always a movement, first, to give the geographical
expression a soul, and, next, to give the soul a
chance of expressing the best and most vital
that is in it. The only condition upon which we
can have what Mazzini finely called the " Holy
Alliance of the Peoples " is that all the peoples
shall be free and equal, each living according to
its own conscience and its own idea of civilization.

In order to live according to its own conscience,
a nation has often to rid itself of foreign domina-
tion in its government, or in its finance, or in its
industries, or in its intellectual life ; for a foreign
tyranny is usually more deadening to the soul of
a people than even the worst home tyranny. Thus,
Nationalism is in one respect a protest against the
domination of foreigners: which seems to many
people to be a narrow business. Nationalism, on
the other hand, is equally a protest against the sub-
jection of foreigners : it is as wide and humane as
the hatred of slavery. It stands for universal rights,
and makes for understanding, not misunderstanding,
between nation and nation, for the nations can only
speak to each other with understanding when each
is free and respects the freedom of its neighbour.
Thus, Nationalism is the necessary complement of
Internationalism. Either without the other becomes
perverted and inhuman, and is a denial of great
spiritual principles. The true Nationalist is he who
aims at universal peace and brotherhood through
universal liberty. He therefore believes that the
dominant peoples stand to gain no less than the
subject peoples from the spread of the national idea.
He holds that if, for instance, the English nation
were substituted for the British Empire, there would
be fewer possibilities of wars, and that the English

ON NATIONALISM AND NATIONALITY

people would make for themselves a fuller, freer,
happier and more imaginative civilization. That,
however, is a point upon which I have no time just
now to dwell. Mr. Chesterton is one of the few
writers who have emphasized this very necessary
side of the Nationalist theory. Perhaps he will one
day give us a book on the necessity of Nationalism
as a political principle, no less for the nations that
are at present swollen into empires than for the
nations that have dwindled into geographical expres-
sions.

152

THE SPIRIT OF MAN

One effect of the Russian Revolution has been
to revive the faith of vast multitudes of people in the
spirit of man. Mr. Robert Bridges some time ago
compiled an anthology in honour of the spirit of
man and its soarings. But the Russian Revolution
has touched the imagination of thousands on whom
Mr. Bridges' selections from the world's literature
have no effect beyond that of airy eloquence. In
the Russian Revolution they see the achievement of
the almost impossible. They had grown as sceptical
in regard to the success of revolutions especially in
Russia as the Pope's Legate in A Soul's Tragedy
with his mocking comment : " I have known four-
and-twenty leaders of revolts." And it was not only
in regard to revolutions that many people had
recently been growing sceptical. The first idealism
in which the war had been begun had lost most of
its brightness like a three-year-old penny, and a
prosaic and doubting dullness had taken its place in
the minds of thousands who in 1914 were the most
magnificent spendthrifts of words like " freedom,"
"humanity," and "national honour." Men who at
that time desired to rebuild the world had relapsed
into the dingdong of commonplace existence, and
would have been well enough content to defeat
the Germans and leave the rebuilding of the world
to those who (in, say, a thousand years' time)
may have more leisure on their hands. It was a
natural reaction. The secret of perpetual idealism
has not been discovered any more than the secret
of perpetual motion. It is never likely to be dis-
covered while newspapers outshriek each other in

153

THE SPIRIT OF MAN

a manner that debases an atmosphere richer than
Homer in disinterested heroism to the level of a
squabble of drunken costers. The perversion of the
issues of the war by the sensational Press has made
ideals seem nothing but platitudes spoken with the
tongue in the cheek and an air as of " I don't think ! "
But it is not only the Press that is to blame for
so great a part of the public's having fallen back into
the habit of jog-trot and commonplace aims. The
limitations of human nature itself are the chief
culprits. Human nature in the Allied countries
began the war prepared for a brief and glorious
flight. It found itself expected to remain at exalted
levels over Christmas, then over a second Christmas,
then over a third Christmas. It realized that it was
impossible to stay so far above the ground for so
long. It sank with exhausted wings, and the war
ultimately became a custom rather than an inspira-
tion. Apart from this, a feeling of human helpless-
ness was common. Pessimism had in many people
restored to life the theory that human beings were
being used by a blind fate in a futile quarrel that
would leave everything almost exactly where it had
been before except for some millions of mourners.
"The more it changes, the more it is the same,"
they quoted, and sat down to rest in sad arm-chairs
above the battle. They recalled the fact that Pitt
had made war on the French Revolution with as
fine phrases as those with which Mr. Asquith made
war on Prussia. They forgot that, while Pitt had
made war on armed opinions that were for the most
part right, the England of Mr. Asquith's time had
made war on armed opinions that were devilishly
wrong. They saw in the present as in the Napo-
leonic War only the drifting of helpless millions of
atoms into collision. They recalled Mr. Hardy's
picture in The Dynasts of monstrous armies advanc-
ing to the attack like legions of cheesemites. They

THE SPIRIT OF MAN

told themselves that another Mr. Hardy a hundred
years hence would see the present conflict in the
same terms of infinite littleness. The spirit of man
seemed to them a decided failure, incapable of self-
direction, a doomed and homeless wanderer, hurried
nowhere in particular like dust in the wind.

Most of us, to tell the truth, look at human nature
through the different ends of the telescope by turns.
Now we marvel at its infinite smallness; the next
day we are amazed by its immensity, as of a god
come down to earth. There is no doubt that the
reading of history makes the philosophical exceed-
ingly sensible of the littleness of man. What
reputable cause of war, they ask, had Athens and
Sparta, or Carthage and Rome, or England and
France ? They reduce the very Crusades to adven-
tures in pursuit of gain, and from Julius Caesar to
Louis Quatorze they see the lust of power wasting
the lives of simple people for greedy ends. This,
however, is too easy an interpretation of history.
After all, even if the lust for power marches through
history as the principal character, the challenge to
the lust for power also rings out triumphantly with
splendid iteration. No doubt, as one manifestation
of the lust for power is defeated, another rises in its
place. The defender of liberty in one generation
may be the attacker of liberty in the next. At the
same time in spite of the ebb and flow in human
affairs, it is difficult to believe, after reading history,
that the sway of human progress is perfectly symbol-
ized by the sway of the sea. One simply cannot
admit that no real progress has been made from the
beastliness of primitive man. The true image of the
spirit of man is not the coming aud going of the
tide, but a builder. Its great aim is to build some-
thing permanent a civilization, a church, a poem.
Its history is to some extent a history of failures.
But amid a wilderness of failures suddenly we come

THE SPIRIT OF MAN

in full view of one of its master achievements. Out
of a tangle of meaningless centuries of war emerges
the Roman sense of order. Amid the base ambi-
tions of a long line of kings, the French ideal of
manners slowly comes into being, a gift to the world.
The English passion for personal liberty a passion
much counterfeited in the nineteenth century and
much derided in this is mainly the gift of men
who, if looked at through the belittling end of the
telescope, appear egotists and brawlers. There is a
good deal to be said for disparaging most of the
people one meets in history, as there is apparently
for nearly every everybody does it a good deal to
be said for disparaging the people one meets in
ordinary life. But this is quite consistent with a
never-ending amazement at the noble inheritance
bequeathed to us by the creative human spirit. One
may find good reasons for disbelieving in every
individual leader in the French Revolution there
are certainly few whom one regards with affection
but it is a sort of political infidelity to disbelieve
in the resurrection of human nature which the spirit
behind the French Revolution brought about.

One has no more right to be disappointed in
history than in humanity. The very young have
some right to be disappointed in both. But none
of the rest of us has the right, unless we cling to
happy illusions about the immediate perfectibility
of human nature. There is a time in the life of an
imaginative young man when he accepts "The
world's great age begins anew " as the only creed
fit for a spring morning. He believes he is just on
the eve of the great social revolution which is to
settle everything. Human nature, he tells himself,
has only to have the case for Utopia laid before it
with passion and understanding in order to insist on
beginning on the foundations of it with the next
sunrise. It is a view which is impossible, in a sense,

THE SPIRIT OF MAN

to men of experience, but none the less there is a
fundamental truth in it which men of experience
usually ignore. Here at least we have a recognition
of the almost immeasurable scope of the human
spirit. Here is the assertion of the adventurers
that there is no North Pole too difficult to be dis-
covered no problem so desperate that it must be
abandoned as insoluble. The uttermost faith in
human nature has far more kinship with truth than
the uttermost distrust in human nature. Yet the old
men still go on shaking their heads and regarding
a headshake as the last gesture of wisdom. Expe-
rience with many people means little more than a
hardening of the arteries. These people find it
difficult to believe that a better world will ever exist
than the England of the day before yesterday, that
a better poet will ever exist than Shakespeare, that
a better sculptor will ever exist than Pheidias. They
regard the spirit of man which built the Pyramids
and the Parthenon and the Cathedral of Amiens,
which created the Greek city-state and the Roman
civilization and the French Revolution as having
sunk into a middle-age content with moderate aims
like themselves. The fires of the world, they think,
are burnt out, and humanity will cease to hurl itself
wastefully against the brazen walls of the impossible.
At least, so -they thought till the war broke out and
disturbed them with a sense of mightier, madder
efforts than any Shelleyan dreamer had ever sum-
moned them to make. And now comes the Russian
Revolution with its astonishing renunciations and
ideals to remind them that the Shelleys govern the
world no less than the kings and the countinghouses.
Faith in human nature awakes again, and even those
who look back with disappointment on the French
Revolution are looking forward with hope to the
Revolution in Russia. They feel like beginning the
calendar anew and making this the first year of the

157

THE SPIRIT OF MAN

world. It was once said by an aged politician that
no change does half so much good as those who
advocate it hope, or half so much harm as those who
oppose it fear. It is the lesson of experience, but,
thus stated, it implies a certain despair which would
weaken man's efforts and enfeeble his dreams. There
is no need to anticipate disillusion. Events such as
the Russian Revolution are quite as likely to give
the lie to our faithlessness as to our faith. Without
them we are apt to forget that the spirit of man can
accomplish wonders in the present surpassing even
the wonders of the past. There are still many
people in Western Europe who regard so modest a
proposal as the abolition of poverty as mere rainbow-
chasing. One great service the Russian Revolution
is doing us is that it is diminishing the incredulity
of the average man in regard to the better future of
the world. Men are bringing out their Utopias from
their cupboards again, and are dusting them with a
look of satisfaction.

158

A SELECTION FROM
MAUNSEL'S ANNOUNCEMENTS

40 MUSEUM ST., LONDON
50 LOWER BAGGOT ST., DUBLIN

PADRAIC PEARSE'S
COLLECTED WORKS

Vol. I-PLAYS, POEMS AND STORIES.
Demy 8vo. 75. 6d. net.

He was an out-and-out rebel ... a rebel who was a poet,
a visionary who worked not for prosperity, or even for political
freedom, bnt for an idea. Such rebels are not politicians but
lovers ; and Pearse was in love with Ireland. . . . The
literature left by Pearse speaks him one of those rare people
who live dedicated lives and are so aflame with spiritual pas-
sion and the glory of the vision that they care nothing what
happens to their bodies or their names. His literature gives
him spirit with all its unworldliness, its purity, its singleness
of direction, its faith and its courage. Times Literary Supplement.

His work is all in the last analysis a passionate statement of a
mystical creed of sacrificial patriotism, . . . the plays and poems
are on fire with a faith which will affect even . . . the most stern
and unbending of Unionists. Daily News and Leader.

We read this book in which is gathered the stories, plays and
poems of the dend leader of the last Irish rebellion, and we
found in it not a single thought which is ignoble. Probably
no more selfless spirit ever broke itself against the might
of the Iron Age than this man's spirit, which was lit up by
love of children and country, a dreamer with his heart in
the Golden Age. Undoubtedly Padraic Pearse was a powerful
and unique personality, and the publication of this volume in
which is collected his best writing will give him that place in
Irish literature which he is entitled to by merit, and which
would be justly his quite apart from the place in Irish History
he has gained by his astonishing enterprise. The Irish Homestead.

The publication ... of the literary works of the leaders of the
Irish Insurrection has helped us more than mighthavebeenexpected
to understand the motives and hopes which lay behind their action.

There can be no qnestion, after this book of his writings of the
sincerity and intensity of his love for Ireland, or of the fact that
his life was seriously devoted to one end. The plays and poems
should convince the reader, more than anything hitherto published,
that the contention is right which argues that an independent Irish
literature is possible. Westminster Gazettt.

The best of the plays at their best are exquisitely beautiful ;
a delicate simplicity of phrase, . . . and a curious and haunting
athmosphere of suppressed excitement and eager anticipation
making them little gems of art. Pall Mall Gazette.

P ADR A 1C PEARSE (continued).

Here then is a book which a considerable number of human
beings already regard as a holy book, because a man died for
what is written in it. ... The Pearse we find in the collected
works is something more than an earnest schoolmaster. His
earnestness has now been intensified into passion. His faith
has become exalted into mystciism. His plays and poems are pro-
phetic of suffering. These plays and poems are beautiful with a
faith in the destiny of the poor and the oppressed, and in the
power of self-sacrifice to redeem the travailing world.

Robert Lynd in The New Statesman.

Vol. II SONGS OF THE IRISH
REBELS, and Specimens from an Irish
Anthology. Gaelic Poems collected and
translated by PADRAIC PEARSE. Demy
8vo. 58. net.

The first part of this Anthology contains poems in Gaelic of the
Irish Rebels, collected and translated into English by Padraic
Pearse. The second part is a collection of songs of unknown
singers of the hamlets and hillsides; of these the Author writes:
"The wind of poetry bloweth where it listeth, and in Ireland
in these later years it has often blown into the cottage of the
peasant. I have availed myself freely of the harvests of other
gleaners, but always with due acknowledgment. The fact that a
piece has been often published or translated has not seemed to me
justification for excluding it. The only question with which I have
concerned myself is the question of literary excellence. I will
print here nothing in which I do not find the essential wine of
poetry."

THE STORY OF A SUCCESS. An

account of St. Enda's School by PADRAIC
PEARSE, edited and completed by DESMOND
RYAN. Illustrated. 35. 6d. net.

Padraic Pearse in his last instructions for the publication of his
writings referring to his notes, "By Way of Comment" in AH
Macaomh said : " they form a continuous and more or less readable
narrative of St. Enda's College from its foundation up to May, 1913.
I should like my friend and pupil, Desmond Ryan, to add an
additional chapter describing the fortunes of St. Enda's since then,
and the whole to be published in a book under his editorship."
The book is not only an account of St. Enda's but gives Pearse's
educational ideals, and views, and shows the very lofty, spiritual,
national and intellectual standard he set before his pupils. It
also throws many interesting sidelights on his character and
temperament.

JAMES CONNOLLY

LABOUR IN IRELAND. By JAMES CON-
NOLLY, with an Introduction by ROBERT
LYND. 45. net. Contains Labour in Irish
History and The Reconquest of Ireland.

New and cheaper edition in 2 Voh. Wrappers,
is. net each.

James Connolly is described by Mr. Robert Lynd as Ireland's
first Socialist martyr: "a simple historical fact that must be
admitted even by those who dispute the wisdom of his actions
and the righteousness of his ideals." When Labour in Irish
History was published several years ago, Connolly was a man
unknown outside of labour circles; it was, however, recognized on
all sides that here was a new and original interpretation of the
historical Irish struggle for self-government. The book is an
examination of Irish history in the light of modern Socialist theory,
and is also a history of the militancy of the Irish poor during the
last two centuries. The Reconquest of Ireland, whieh was first
published in 1915 as a pamphlet, describes social conditions still
prevailing in Ireland " this," says Mr. Lynd, "is the prose
Inferno of Irish Poverty and ends on a note of hope for the
overthrow of the capitalist society, which was, in Connolly's
opinion, so utterly alien to the genius of the Gael."

It Is only in Labour in Ireland, by James Connolly, that we
get the complete political testament and find the mental traveller
in that mood of exasperation about his country, where we under-
stand how the next stage may be the dropping of the pen and the
shouldering of the rifle. . . . Labour in Ireland cannot be over-
looked by any interested in Irish problems. The Times.

In Labour in Ireland we have from the pen of James Connolly
a statement of his views, but more than that, we have a useful
historical account of the development of Irish economic conditions
From this point of view the book is valuable. Liverpool Courier.

This book has a double interest. It has great intrinsic merit as
an essay upon the part which labour and capital hare played in
the history of Ireland. . . . It is a work of scientific value, for
it proves its facts by statistics and documents. New Statesman.

We must refer the reader to the book itself ; it will well repay
study by those who wish to gain further light on one of our worst
and most difficult problems. Glasgow Evening News.

IRISHMEN OF TO-DAY

A series of Books dealing with the work of
notable Irishmen of to-day and the Move-
ments with which they have been associated.
2/6 net, each Volume.

NEW VOLUMES
DOUGLAS HYDE. By DIARMID

O'COBHTHAITH.

This is the sixth volume in Maunsel's popular Irishmen of
To-day series. Mr. Diarmid O'Cobhthaigh gives an eloquent
appreciation of the activities of Dr. Douglas Hyde both as a man of
letters and propagandist of the Gaelic League. It is the book of an
affectionate admirer, which contains at the same time an able
exposition of Irish ideas. Those who wish to obtain a summary of
the teaching of the Gaelic League will find it here restated in a
compendious form.

Sir Horace Plunkett and his Place in
the Irish Nation. By EDWARD E.
LYSAGHT.

Mr. Lysaght, who is both a co-operator and an advanced
Nationalist, seeks in this book to interpret Sir Horace Plunkett
t those of his countrymen who have hitherto mistrusted or
misunderstood him. We have no hesitation in saying that hs
has succeeded in doing this, and at the same time in providing
the British and Irish public with a real exposition of thoughtful
Nationalism.

" Mr. Lysaght, a practical farmer, and also a poet of con
siderable merit, writes well. . . . He is more concerned to
discuss Irish policy in a serious and informed spirit than to
ventilate his own individual opinions." The Times Literary
Supplement.

" Mr. Lysaght is an Irishman of parts. He is a poet of country
life, an active Nationalist of the modern school, an Irish speaker,
an economist, and a practising co-operative agriculturist. His
versatility fits him well to write the new volume in Messrs.

Maunsel's series of Notable Irishmen of To-day "

Daily News and Leader.

" . . . . Mr. Lysaght's intimate and delicate appreciation
oi a new Ireland . . . ." Ntw Statesman.

THE NATIONAL BEING. Some Thoughts
on an Irish Polity. By JE. Crown 8vo.
45. 6d. net.

" Stands out among the innumerable social books that stream
from the presses like a gentle giant among a crowd of
clamouring pigmies." Time*.

" Breathes a note of confidence, of hope triumphant and
undismayed, of spiritual adventure and high courage that only
the ears of youth can catch. XL's message is not to the
politicians of to-day, but to the future nation-builders of Ireland."
Athcnteum.

" This very nobly written book." The Observer.

" Commands respect as an expression of the aspirations of a
true friend of Ireland, and an indefatigable worker in the one
field in which a constructive and reconciling policy has been
carried to a successful issue in that country." The Spectator.

" A great book for Ireland, and for the socialist movement."
Labour Leader.

" This book . . . will be hailed by future generations as a
landmark in the arid wastes of speculations on Irish problems."
Northern Whig.

AN IRISH APOLOGIA. Some Thoughts
on Anglo-Irish relations and the war.
By WARRE B. WELLS. Cloth as. net ;
paper, is. net

There is nothing rarer in literature than a dispassionate study
of contemporary political feeling. Mr. Wells writes as an English-
man in Ireland, explaining Irish Nationalism to his countrymen,
and he does it with sympathy, insight and intelligence. The Irish
Homestead.

MY LITTLE FARM. By "PAT," Author
of " Economics for Irishmen " and the
Sorrows of Ireland." Wrappers, is. net.

An account of farming experiences and food production in the
West of Ireland by one who is both a practical farmer and an
established reader of letters.

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